This paper is about the language attitudes that bilingual youth in Singapore have towards their Mother Tongue and English, and towards codeswitching between the two. The language attitudes of 443 primary school students were investigated using a variation of the matched-guise technique. Status and solidarity dimensions of attitudes, with ethnicity…

This study examines functions of teacher code-switching in secondary school English and science classrooms in Malaysia, where English has recently been implemented as the language of instruction for science. Classroom interaction data were obtained from two English lessons and a science lesson. Analysis of the teachers' code-switching using…

In this paper we investigate multilingualism as a phenomenon which pervades different social and cultural levels but is manifested in the everyday life of multilingual individuals. As an illustration, we examine multilingualism from the perspective of a young Sami boy, Ante, and explore how different languages function as a complex--but at times…

This article poses the question of how educators can put into practice the valorization of the vernacular and its use as a pedagogical resource. It provides a critical sociolinguistic orientation toward the use of Spanglish in schools. It gives a short descriptive overview of the linguistic features of Spanglish and responds to some of the…

Two experiments tested language switching effects with bilingual participants in a priming paradigm with masked primes (duration of 50ms in Experiment 1 and 100ms in Experiment 2). Participants had to monitor target words for animal names, and ERPs were recorded to critical (non-animal) words in L1 and L2 primed by unrelated words from the same or…

This paper reports on my first-hand experiences of being a "purist" in Hong Kong, during which time I was not allowed to use mixed code, a common discursive practice among Hongkongers in Hong Kong. I shall discuss the difficulties in using "pure" English and "pure" Chinese in my daily life, as well as exploring the…

Radio is one of the most affordable educational technologies available for the use in education and development in developing countries. This article explores the use of school radio broadcast to assist teachers and pupils to learn and improve English language both written and spoken in Kenyan primary schools. English language occupies a central…

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.…

This article summarizes research on how students who are bilingual or learning English use two languages and examines how this research is relevant to mathematics classrooms. It is easy to notice that bilingual students sometimes use two languages. It is more difficult to know whether this practice might be significant to learning mathematics.…

According to Bernstein (A sociolinguistic approach to socialization; with some reference to educability, Basil Blackwell Ltd., 1972), middle-class parents transmit an elaborated code to their children that relies on verbal means, rather than paralinguistic devices or shared assumptions, to express meanings. Bernstein's ideas were used to argue…

The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) is currently implementing a program to improve the language proficiency of pilots and air traffic controllers worldwide. In justifying the program, ICAO has cited a number of airline accidents that were at least partly caused by language factors. Two accidents cited by ICAO are analysed in this…

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…

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…

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…

The article discusses relationships between codeswitching and identities in classroom peer group talk among students from a variety of Asian and European backgrounds who were studying English in Australia. The article focusses on talk that, in being concealed from the teacher through codeswitching, allows expression of identities that are not…