,,… als ich Kind war, hatten wir das everywhere.” Sprachwechsel als Lern- und Kommunikationsstrategie in einem Tandemgespräch

Abstract

This article presents findings of a pilot study on how language switch is used in a discussionbetween Finnish and German speaking students. Language switch in L2-interaction has been mostly considered as interference and a communicative deficit. After the Common European Framework of References for Languages highlighted the importance of plurilingual competences, language switch and other plurilingual strategies have been seen more positively as a productive way of reaching a communicative goal. The data analyzed in this article have been derived from a recorded group discussion in a Tandem course. As Tandem includes aspects of both didactic and non-didactic communication, the analysis also intends to find out whether language switch is used primarily as a communication strategy or as a learning strategy. The results illustrate that language switch is widely used in the data, mostly by the participants interacting in the L2 (German) and it mostly occurs when searching for lexical items. Language switches both to L1 (Finnish) and to L3 (English) appear almost to the same extent and they clearly serve communicative and learning purposes.