Learner Code-Switching in the Content-Based Foreign Language Classroom

Abstract

This article is republished from The Canadian Modern Language Review,60, 4, pp. 501–526. It is published as an article exchange between the MLJ and the CMLR. The articles for the exchange were selected by committees from the Editorial Board of each journal according to the following criteria: articles of particular relevance to international readers, especially those in the United States and Canada; and articles that are likely to provoke scholarly discussion among readers of the journal of their republication. The MLJ thanks Keiko Koda, chair, Michael Everson, Lourdes Ortega, and Ross Steele for their work selecting this CMLR article for republication in the MLJ. The MLJ article to appear in the CMLR, 61, 5, is: “Second Language Acquisition as Situated Practice: Task Accomplishment in the French Second Language Classroom,” by Lorenza Mondada and Simona Pekarek Doehler (MLJ, 88, 2004, pp. 501–518). The Editors of both journals hope their readers will find this sharing of scholarship interesting and beneficial. Using a framework based on conversation analysis (Auer, 1984, 1995, 1998), this article presents an analysis of learner code-switching between first language (L1) and second language (L2) in an advanced foreign language (FL) classroom. It was found that students code-switch not only as a fallback method when their knowledge of the L2 fails them, or for other participant-related functions, but also for discourse-related functions that contexualize the interactional meaning of their utterances. These uses strikingly resemble code-switching patterns in non-classroom bilingual settings and show that language learners are able to conceptualize the classroom as a bilingual space. Learners orient to the classroom as a community of practice (Wenger, 1998) through their code-switching patterns as manifestations of a shared understanding about their actions and about themselves as members of that community.