An Interview with Dr. Bambi Schieffelin

Abstract

On June 12, 2018, Dr. Hansun Zhang Waring’s Language Socialization class at Teachers College, Columbia University had the great pleasure and honor of being joined by Dr. Bambi Schieffelin, Collegiate Professor at New York University. A co-founder (with Elinor Ochs) of the field of language socialization, Dr. Schieffelin has done extensive research on linguistic anthropology, language ideology, literacy, missionization, and much, much more. She is the author of the ethnography The Give and Take of Everyday Life: Language Socialization of Kaluli Children, co-author of the classic chapter “Language Acquisition and Socialization: Three Developmental Stories and Their Implications,” and co-author of the Handbook of Language Socialization—a foundational reference work for all language socialization scholars. In this interview, she shares her path to Language Socialization (LS), experiences from her groundbreaking LS work in Papua New Guinea, affordances, obstacles, and recent developments in LS research, and key takeaways for LS researchers.