The Central Institute of Indian Languages,
established in July 1969, conducts research in the areas of language analysis,
language pedagogy, language technology and language use with a bias towards problem-solving
and national integration. The institute
firmly believes that language is a very important carrier of social and cultural
values, and as such the programmes of the Institute have been deliberately designed
to be inter-disciplinary from the very inception of the Institute.
This book, Positions on Socialization, by Dr. M. S. Thirumalai, Professor-cum-Deputy
Director, CIIL is an interesting attempt to bring out the multi-facets of the
socialization process. Socialization,
considered, among other things, to be an embodiment of social self is discussed
in the backdrop of language acquisition and language use in this book. The book is divided into four chapters 1 defines
socialization and presents the scope of the concept in general terms; Chapter
2 presents several of the major sociological approaches to the study of socialization
through an interpretation of the ideas of sociologists such as Herbert Spencer,
George Simmel, G. H. Mead, Max Waber and others; Chapter 3 discusses the social
psychological approaches to socialization, focusing on psychosexual, psychosocial,
and normative-maturational bases, apart from various learning theories and others;
Chapter 4 presents the anthropological interpretations of socialization based
on the views of influential anthropologists such as Ruth Benedict, Radcliffe-Brown,
Raymond Firth, Malinowski, Levi-Strauss and Margaret Mead.
This book will be found interesting and useful by students and scholars
of linguistics and adjacent sciences, who wish to have a comprehensive view of
socialization.
Director
D.
PPATTANAYAK