ABSTRACT
In traditional societies, children were segregated from the work and social life of adults, and thus they learn to become members of their culture through nonverbal fostering of observation and engagement. This chapter analyzes the ways in which children's participation in the culturally structured activity of dinner, with the guidance, support, and challenge of adult companions, serves the development of discourse competencies related to membership in literate cultures. The theoretical perspective is particularly illuminating in interpreting the role of dinner talk for pragmatic socialization. Family dinnertime, in the families studied, is a communicative event bounded in time and space, delimited in its participants and—as will be shown—governed by its own rules of interaction. Family dinners are familial we events shared with children; as such, they may carry important intentional socialization functions, ranging from table manners to socialization for family values. The quintessential expression of the egalitarian ideology is through the treatment of children at dinner as ratified participants.
