The Forum

The rise of multilingualism has drawn the attention of language researchers and instructors to various phenomena that have been observed in multilingual speakers, who develop knowledge on how and when to use their languages depending on, for instance, the interlocutors involved in the conversation, the topic of the conversation, and the social context (Reyes, 2004). The present paper aims to focus on two representative multilingual phenomena, namely code-switching and translanguaging. Each phenomenon will be defined based on existing literature and their potential functions in multilingual classroom research will be highlighted and discussed. Code-switching is a bilingual-mode activity in which more than one language, typically speakers ’ native language and second language (L2), are used intrasententially or intersententially (Cook, 2001). Code-switching has not been welcomed in traditional L2 classrooms where the students ’ target language and native language are clearly divided, and the target language has to be the ‘official ’ language in the classroom. Such a tendency may have been due to the general belief that switching to an alternate language is the result of having incomplete knowledge of the language in which the utterance was initiated (e.g. Reyes, 2004). Many researchers now admit that code-switching commonly takes place in multilingua