Language plays a very important role in understanding the culture and mindset of people. Given the abundance of electronic multilingual data, it is interesting to see what insight can be gained by automatic analysis of text. This in turn calls for text analysis which is focused on non-topical information such as emotions being expressed that is in…

In a bilingual community, people often switch from one language to another in their daily conversations and the use of code-switching often reflects the social or cultural identities of the speakers. The switch to a particular language in the bilingual discourse can also be employed as an effective vehicle to signal ethnic identity. This paper…

This article focuses on the learner's use of Code-switching to learn the TL (Target Language) equivalent of an L1 word. The interactional pattern that this situation creates defines the Request-Provision-Acknowledgement (RPA) sequence. The article explains each of the turns of the sequence under the combination of the Ethnomethodological…

"Code-switching," or the alternation of languages by bilinguals, has attracted an enormous amount of attention from researchers. However, most research has focused on spoken language, and the resultant theoretical frameworks have been based on spoken code-switching. This volume presents a collection of new work on the alternation of…

This article uses multiple theoretical perspectives to understand the synergy that occurs between linguistically diverse parents and children during reading interactions. Through the detailed analysis of code-switching during book-sharing activities in a middle-class, bilingual home, we can observe how linguistically diverse parents support the…

This article explores the compensatory strategies used by two Indonesian children who experienced first language attrition when acquiring English in the English-speaking environment. They use compensatory strategies to compensate for their lack of competence in first language. They employ both interlingual strategies and discourse strategies when…

Drawing on Lave and Wenger's (1991) and Wenger's (1998) "communities of practice" (CoP) framework, this study explores the shared repertoire of humor practices in the creation of community within the context of a culturally diverse and multilevel adult Arabic language classroom consisting of two native speakers, five heritage language learners…

In this article, the author takes a close look at the discursive ways that Black and Latina preservice teachers reconcile tensions between their racial and linguistic identities and the construction of teacher identities in the current context of preservice teacher education in the United States. Through the study of language as representative of…

Reasons for code-switching in young children range from the linguistic (single-word borrowings that appear to be translation equivalents or to fill gaps in lexical knowledge) to more complex sociolinguistic and sociocognitive factors, such as desiring affiliative interactions. We looked at patterns of code-switching in narratives derived from…

This conversation analytic study reveals how learners themselves, as speakers and listeners, demonstrate their own orientation to language code and actions on a moment by moment basis during collaborative tasks in English as a foreign language classrooms. The excerpts presented in this article were drawn from 23 hours of audio- and video-recorded…

Code-switching research has focused on spontaneous conversation, and code-switching has often been seen as a consequence of bilinguals attending to and extending the "macro" status and functions of the two languages in society, attitudes towards these languages, and their cultural connotations, for instance, the "we-code" vs.…

The uniquely human capacity of using arbitrary signs to transfer concept and experience over great distances in time and place is what we call language. We use language with a purpose, and we use whatever features are at our disposal to achieve our ends, regardless of the fact that some speakers think that certain features should be held together…

Some US researchers and practitioners are calling for the use of written codeswitching in mainstream college courses, despite a strong English-only sentiment among many teachers and the public. This paper describes the existing positions in this debate and presents findings from the author's research to shed light on the debate and make…

Speakers often perform impromptu translations during bilingual interaction. Such translations can hold a wide variety of socio-pragmatic functions including reiteration, emphasis, recasting, and repair. When translations occur in multi-party talk where the interactants are of mixed linguistic proficiencies, they may also serve to include…

This paper deals with linguistic diversity as it occurs in a conversation over dinner between three young Turkish-Danish men living in Denmark. I argue that terms like "bilingual" or "multilingual" are inappropriate in order to describe this verbal interaction because these terms presuppose that linguistic production is divided…