Children in the early years classrooms code-switching. (c2011)

Abstract

This paper focuses on the different reasons students code-switch, how they code-switch, why, where and when they code-switch. It attempts to show how much students have been codeswitching nowadays. This paper also attempts to describe the reasons young children codeswitch in the classroom with one another. The two instruments used in order to explore the issue of code-switching in the Early Years classrooms were participant observation, where observation of students were made in different classes and documentation of their dialogue was recorded, and teacher interviews, where interviews were conducted with five teachers in the Early Years department. The results showed that children tended to code-switch in order to negotiate the language for their interaction and to adapt to other students’ favoured language and their capability in addition to manage conversational talk. The results also showed that codeswitching is employed as a supplementary resource to attain certain conversational objectives in interactions with other bilingual speakers. Research should be conducted on the on the presentation of the literature on mixing in bilingual children during the earliest of language acquisition. More research should also be done on students’ code-switching and the reasons they code-switch should be made.