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…

Bilinguals spontaneously switch languages in conversation even though laboratory studies reveal robust cued language switching costs. The authors investigated how voluntary-switching costs might differ when switches are voluntary. Younger (Experiments 1-2) and older (Experiment 3) Spanish-English bilinguals named pictures in 3 conditions: (a)…

The ideology of monolingualism prevails throughout society, including within minority ethnic communities who are bilingual and multilingual. Some minority ethnic communities in Britain believe that the response to the dominance of English language is to replace it with other languages. Complementary schools--language and culture classes organised…

This article demonstrates how evidence related to performance in computer mediated communication (CMC) can be used as a vehicle for researching pupils' thinking about using and learning a foreign language. The analysis is based on a qualitative study of pupils from two contrasting schools who had taken part in a multinational CMC project involving…

This article focuses on children's language alternation practices in two primary school settings. More specifically we explore how participants (children and teachers) in episodes of language alternation invoke linguistic and social identities, thereby "talking into being" language and educational ideologies. The present study is based…

The focus of this paper is the small postcolonial country of the Gambia. As in other parts of postcolonial Africa, English plays a major role in the education system. The paper reports on the conflicts and tensions which are evident when "vernacular" languages are used in the classroom. Although the study is based on substantial periods…

This study examines how bilingual family members use language choice and language alternation as a local scheme of interpretation to distinguish different and often contesting social identities in interaction. It is argued that the playful creation of oppositional identities in interaction relieves the speakers from responsibility and creates a…

From incorporation into the Russian Empire in 1828, through the collapse of the U.S.S.R. in 1991 governmental language policies and other socio/political forces influenced the Turkic population of the Republic of Azerbaijan to speak Russian. Even with changes since independence Russian use--including various kinds of code-switching and…

This paper presents the findings that explored from the discourse practices of the mathematics teacher educators in initial teacher training colleges in Malawi. It examines how mathematics teacher educators construct a multilingual classroom and how they view code-switching. The discussion is based on pre-observation interviews with four…

Li Wei (1995) notes that relatively little sociolinguistic work on bilingualism has attempted to analyze and compare the complex relationships between aspects of language choice and code-switching among subgroups of the same community. This study aims to investigate the co-existence of two structurally different Cantonese-English code-switching…

Second generation immigrants tend to shift their loyalty from their own languages ("immigrant language") to the language of the host country ("societal language"), given the socioeconomically weak vitality position of the immigrant languages. This language shift makes intergenerational communication, especially with folk left…

The purpose of the study was to gain an in-depth understanding of the emotional expression in the narration of autobiographical stories of Chinese international students in their respective languages (i.e., Mandarin and English). It addressed the methodological limitations of previous research on bilinguals' emotional expression and…

This paper begins by looking at responses to Bernstein in Germany in the 1970s that criticized his notions of class difference in sociolinguistic codes. As part of a re-examination of Bernstein's ideas, the paper goes on to look at the current communicative situation in German education where urban schools have many second-generation immigrant…

This volume collects empirical studies applying Conversation Analysis to situations where second, third and other additional languages are used. A number of different aspects are considered, including how linguistic systems develop over time through social interaction, how participants 'do' language learning and teaching in classroom and everyday…

This paper reports on an initial examination of the use of out-group linguistic forms by speakers in a multilingual speech community in Malaysia. It employs the poststructuralist model of identity, and within codeswitching research, considers the notions of contextualisation cues, accommodation and the practice of crossing as a conceptual…