[[alternative]]Chinese English Code Mixing--A Case Study of Hong Kong International School

[[abstract]]The purpose of this study is to investigate the classroom code-mixing situations at an international school classroom in the view of the following three hypotheses: 1. Students who have the Chinese language background (regular stream) would perform better than those who do not (accelerated stream) in Chinese sentence processing. 2. Students at the higher language proficiency level would perform better than those at the lower proficiency level. 3. There would be language transfer between Chinese and English students. A questionnaire and tape-recording were used as quantitative and qualitative research methods in order to analyze the code mixing results. Data were collected from students at the highest and lowest proficiency levels from both language streams. The study has shown statistically significant difference between the students in both language streams who co-mixed their first and second languages. For example, the students in the regular stream (i.e. with the Chinese language background) were found to clearly exhibit forward transfer from Chinese to English, and backward transfer from English to Chinese. Further statistical analysis also reveals that the students in the regular stream signicantly used more of the Chinese (semantic) processing strategy--i.e. animacy or inanimacy--to decide which the agent of a sentence is. On the other hand, the students in the accelerated stream were found to prefer the English (syntactic) processing strategy--i.e. word order and the second noun-- to choose which the agent of a sentence is. Based on the findings, pedagogical implications and suggestions for further studies are provided.