This collection of essays by first and second language researchers and practitioners depicts how professionals from diverse backgrounds and work settings have dealt with the struggles which characterize the professional development of language educators.

This text offers an ethnographic account of language socialization practices within Mexican-background families residing in California and Texas. This account illustrates a variety of cases where language is used by speakers to choose between alternative self-definitions and where language interacts differentially with other defining categories, such as ethnicity, gender and class. It shows that language socialization - instantiated in language choices and patterns of use in sociocultural and sociohistorical contexts characterized by ambiguity and flux - is both a synamic and a fluid process....