Be quiet niños, please!'. Uses of code-switching in four-year-olf monolingual children's second language acquisition (original) (raw)

Code-Switching is, according to Gumperz (1982:97), a phenomenon in which "speakers rely on juxtaposition of grammatically distinct subsystems to generate conversational inferences". The broad use of code-switching in diverse contexts and with at least two languages in contact has made this language practice be one of behavioural features of bilinguals' speech which has been studied most (cf. Gregori and Alcantud 2012). Additionally, code-switching seems to accomplish an important communicative function which includes conversational purposes, that is the reason why it is a very interesting aspect of sociolinguistics to be researched. Nowadays, the development of educational provision is reaching more and more social strata. This fact, together with a wider use of new technologies and globalization, has "served to accentuate our sense of a visibly and audibly multilingual modern world" (Milroy and Muysken 1995:1). One of the consequences of this modernization has been the incorporation of second languages in the subject syllabus at earlier and earlier ages and, as a result, some new ways of communication are being created from this contact between two or more languages; this explains second language acquisition. When children are in contact with second language teachers, code switching is one of the natural devices they use in order to communicate. In fact, the "equivalence constraint on code-switching may be used to measure degree of bilingual ability" (Poplack 1980:581). At the same time, teachers make use of codeswitching within the class with the purpose of achieving a more fluent communication, with their students, among other reasons. It is thus the objective of this article to analyze in which situations code-switching is used inside a second language acquisition classroom of monolingual beginners. To achieve this objective, I selected, recorded and analyzed a class that consisted of four-year-old Spanish monolingual children in their first days of English classes, in order to study the use of code-switching by the teachers. The most remarkable conclusion drawn from the present study is that code-switching is used by teachers and students in a very high percentage to call beginners attention and to make communication and language learning easier. The structure of this article is as follows: I will first discuss some general issues regarding-code switching such as its definition and types. I will later describe at some length the presence of code-switching within the field of language acquisition and I will attempt to restrict the boundaries of the research to code-switching used by teachers, consciously or unconsciously in the early-aged monolingual second language acquisition process. I will subsequently expose a case study carried out in a four-year-old monolingual class. This will finally allow me to draw some conclusions and comments on the uses of code-switching as a teaching/learning strategy for the sake of communication. 2. Theoretical background 2.1 General scope of code-switching This section is devoted to depicting the use of code-switching in a broad spectrum regarding its functions, types and uses. Code-switching can be located within a wide range of linguistic contexts, from "highly educated bilinguals […] talking among themselves, alternating between two codes which closely reflect the relevant monolingual norms, to situations where social multilingualism is the general norm" (Gardner-Chloros 1995:68). Many scholars have been particularly influential in the search for general principles underlying code-switching: Weinreich (1953), Hangen (1950), Gumperz (1972-1984) and Poplack (1980) to mention but a few. Hence, I have made the decision of solely summing up the information gathered from all of these authors and focus on one definition: Code-switching may be understood as the alternative use by bilinguals of two or more languages in the same conversation. The use of this alternation will occur not only between the turns of different speakers in the conversation, but between utterances within a single turn, and even within a single utterance.