Previous studies in child language socialization have adopted the approach of studying how children become competent members of their social groups through the use of language. This study began as an attempt to study child language socialization within selected Tucson U.S. Mexican households within this prevailing paradigm. During the course of fieldwork, it was found that the complexities of Borderlands structural and hegemonic relationships could not be adequately addressed within a theoretical assumption of homeostatic and monosemic communities. The ambiguities of "Mexican-ness" do not provide a consensually agreed upon or collectively implicit framework for language socialization. Instead, fluid domains are contested and negotiated as language socialization is construed as a constitutive process of "selfhood" for the child. Rather than replicating and reproducing previously transmitted information, certain parents and caregivers were found to actively engage in constructing an ethos for their own childhood experiences. Multivocality within multiple interactive spheres was identified as parents and caregivers often alternated between symbolic resistance and opposition, and accomodation. Additionally, an affective base for language socialization is postulated. An "emotion of minority status" that is structurally constituted and embedded within regional hegemonic relations is presented as a formative backdrop for children in this population. The essential methodology involved lengthy ethnographic observations coupled with audiocassette recordings of naturally occurring speech. Caregivers were supplied with tape recorders and cassettes and were asked to record interaction within the households, specifically at mealtime, bed time and homework sessions. In-depth open-ended interviews were taped with parents, and in some cases, grandparents, regarding their own perceptions of child-rearing, language habits, and value orientations. Extensive household histories, detailing residential, labor and family history, were also collected.

The purpose of this study was to examine first-graders' construction of knowledge of graphophonemic and orthographic relationships. Three levels of treatment were assigned randomly to three groups of first-graders in their first semester of first grade. Treatment varied in student engagement with reading and writing texts based on student interests and in the amount of interaction students had with one another and the researcher as they read, wrote, and examined words, word patterns, and graphophonemic relationships. The study was based on a quasi-experimental nonequivalent control group design (Campbell & Stanley, 1963) with an added within-subjects factor of 12 weekly test occasions. These weekly tests involved students writing a researcher-dictated continuous text selected by students in the full-treatment group from the larger portion of text read each week. Additional elements of qualitative research were included in the design and analyses. Quantitative analyses revealed statistically significant results. Qualitative data analyses confirmed that students who interacted daily with each other and the researcher in reading and writing activities constructed more knowledge about graphophonemic and orthographic relationships than peers from the partial-treatment group and the control group. Results led to conclusions and implications involving a reexamination of current and traditional methods of spelling instruction and assessment for young children.