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Description
This study investigates how young Korean-English bilingual children produce codeswitching to contribute to the interaction in a Korean heritage language classroom. Codeswitching is an alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance or conversation in a bilingual or multilingual conversation. Previous research has established that codeswitching can be interpreted as a resource for bilingual or multilingual children to accomplish specific communicative goals. However, codeswtiching in educational settings has not been welcomed. Previous research has reported that codeswitching in an educational context is considered as a deficit of interactional skills. In order to nullify existing negative views of codeswitching in the classroom, a growing literature on codeswitching in the classroom in bilingual situations has shed light on the function of codeswitching as a communicative resource. This study also explores how Korean-English bilingual children employ codeswitching to fulfill their communicative goals. Therefore, the aim of the current study is to answer the following research questions: 1. What are the motivations and functions in a classroom setting? 2. How codeswitching can benefit learning process? In order to facilitate the exposition and analysis of codeswitching in a Korean heritage language classroom, the current study uses Peter Auer's 1984 framework, consisting of participant-related codeswitching and discourse-related codeswitching. Participant-related codeswitching is used to negotiate the proper language in terms of the preference or competence of the individual and co-participants who perform the switchings in the conversation. Discourse-related codeswitching, however, is used to organize conversation by contributing to the interactional meaning of a particular utterance. The findings suggest that the Korean-English bilingual children in this study employed codeswitching to accommodate participants' language preference or competence. Also, the Korean-English bilingual children in this classroom employed codeswitching as a communicative strategy to organize and structure their discourse, such as turn-taking, repairs, and side-sequences. In addition, these bilingual children promoted learner-leaner interaction by employing codeswitching to organize recasts, reiteration, or scaffolding for their classmates.
