Although the originators of the language socialization (LS) paradigm werecareful to cast socialization as a contingent, contested, ‘bidirectional’ process, thefocus in much first language LS research on ‘successful’ socialization amongchildren and caregivers may have obscured these themes. Despite this, I suggestthe call for a more ‘dynamic model’ of LS (Bayley and Schecter 2003), whilecompelling, is unnecessary: contingency and multidirectionality are inherent inLS given its orientation to socialization as an interactionally-mediated process.This paper foregrounds the ‘dynamism’ of LS by examining processes comprising‘unsuccessful’ or ‘unexpected’ socialization. Specifically, it analyses interactionsinvolving ‘oldtimer’ ‘Local ESL’ students and their first-year teachers at amultilingual public high school in Hawai’i. Contingency and multidirectionalityare explicated through analysis of two competing ‘cultural productions of theESL student.’ The first, manifest in ESL program structures and instruction, wasschool-sanctioned or ‘official.’ Socialization of Local ESL students into thisschooled identity was anything but predictable, however, as they consistentlysubverted the actions, stances, and activities that constituted it. In doing so,these students produced another, oppositional ESL student identity, which cameto affect ‘official’ classroom processes in significant ways.INTRODUCTIONThe socialization of children or novices by adults or experts into particularroles, identities, and world views has been the topic of scholarship for decadesacross the social sciences. Concerning as it does ‘the activity that confronts andlends structure to the entry of nonmembers into an already existing world’(Wentworth 1980: 85), the nexus of socialization research engages suchlongstanding problematics as ‘agent vs. structure’, ‘voluntarism vs. determin-ism’, and ‘macro vs. micro’. Depending on disciplinary origin and theoreticalorientation, emphases have varied in the diverse socialization literature on theinfluence that, for example, society has on the individual, or genetics has overthe environment. Notwithstanding differences in emphasis, however, earlytheories of socialization—from the psychoanalytic tradition of Freud (1939),to the sociological functionalisms of Durkheim (1997) and Parsons (1937),