Novinda Pitoyo

Code-Switching Lesson

by Rebecca Wheeler & Rachel Swords

Why teach code-switching?

Code-Switching Lessons will speak to any teacher who finds that his or her classroom is becoming increasingly diverse. While fifty or sixty years ago the students filling our classes may have been overwhelmingly white native English speakers, that’s clearly not the case now.

Now multicultural, multilingual, multidialectical diversity is the norm. Our students come to us from down the block but also from Thailand and China, from South America and Latin America, and from Russia and the Ukraine. Our students are white but also Native American, African American, and Hispanic and come from the bayous of Louisiana as well as the boroughs of New York, with all the attendant differences in pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. With diversity of homeland comes diversity of languages, with English as a second language; with diversity of ethnic and U.S. regional groups comes diversity of dialects and diversity of culture. Our classrooms have become culturally and linguistically diverse, and we need teaching strategies that celebrate and use that diversity as a springboard to wider knowledge.

What are the essential features of a successful code-switching approach?

Refined over nearly ten years of classroom practice and grounded in research, Code-Switching Lessons has the following characteristics:

• It is grounded in student language, written and oral.

• It uses a graphic organizer as an analysis tool.

• It applies the scientific method to grammar discovery.

• It builds on the rules of vernacular and adds Standard English

Cambridge University Press

978-0-521-86264-6 - Code-switching

Penelope Gardner-Chloros

It is quite commonplace for bilingual speakers to use two or more languages, dialects or varieties in the same conversation, without any apparent effort. This phenomenon, known as code-switching, has become a major focus of attention in linguistics. This concise and original study explores how, when and where code-switching occurs. Drawing on a diverse range of examples from medieval manuscripts to rap music, novels to advertisements, emails to political speeches, and above all everyday conversation, it argues that code-switching can only be properly understood if we study it from a variety of perspectives. It shows how sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, grammatical and developmental aspects of code-switching are all interdependent, and findings in each area are crucial to others. Breaking down barriers across the discipline of linguistics, this pioneering book confronts fundamental questions about what a “native language” is, and whether languages can be meaningfully studied independently from individuals who use them.

Code-switching is the mixing of words, phrases and sentences from two distinct grammatical (sub) systems across sentence boundaries within the same speech event. It is observed that all the studies on the phenomena reviewed so far above are silent on the implication the phenomena have on language acquisition right from childhood. It is this area that this study focuses and explores in order to verify what the situational implications are in respect of the acquisition of language in childhood.

(Nordic Journal of African Studies 15(1): 90–99 (2006)

Code-Switching and Code-Mixing:

Style of Language Use in Childhood in Yoruba Speech Community

AYEOMONI, M.O.

Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria