Code-switching in bilingual classrooms

Includes bibliographical references (pages 59-62)This thesis presents the results of a field study of code-switching in kindergarten, first, second, and third grade level classrooms of an experimental Spanish-English bilingual education project in Los Angeles. \ud The research in this present study is addressed to the current problem of a disparity between the goals and means of bilingual education programs. Though many programs state that the maintenance of the ethnic language is a goal, in most cases the structure of the program contradicts this goal (Kjolseth 1973:16).\ud The stated goal of the bilingual education project of this study was the maintenance of Spanish by means of continued language-development in both the students??? native and second languages. In terms of goals, this project was based on a pluralistic model of bilingual education (Kjolseth 1973:5). I determined from a sociolinguistic perspective that the means of implementation of the program contradicted this goal.\ud The main research question was, ???Who speaks what language to whom and when???? (Fishman 1965). Using the Ethnography of Communication model (Hymes 1972) as the theoretical frame of reference, I collected data on code-switching in twelve different setting-participant combinations during language-development lessons.\ud A quantitative measure related code-switching by teachers and students to specific setting-participant combinations. An analysis of the functions of the teacher code-switches indicates that code-switching is a communicative strategy.\ud This study concludes that English is more intrusive in the bilingual classroom than Spanish; that the contrast in the amount of code-switching by teachers may be based on their expectations of the students to communicate in the target language; and that the contrast between the patterns of teacher code-switching during the language lessons may be signaling to students that English functions more efficiently than Spanish for ???important??? messages in the classroom. This demotion of Spanish may be an attitude-motivation factor (Gardner and Lambert 1972, Prode 1971) in both the maintenance of Spanish for native speakers and the acquisition of Spanish for English native speakers.\ud This study suggests that implementers of bilingual education projects which aim to maintain the ethnic language monitor the functional distribution of both the ethnic and the non-ethnic languages in the classrooms