Code-switching In Mandarin-English Bilingual Children

This study examines the code-switching behavior of three Mandarin-English speaking preschool children, all around 4 years old, over a period of five months across a few different settings:their school, their homes, researcher's house, play ground and Chinese Church. Data from audio-taped (partially video-taped) recordings, on-site field notes, and a reflective field journal were triangulated with data from parent and teacher interviews to document the children's code-switching behavior.A total of sixteen functions characterized the children's code-switching. Analysis of the functions revealed that the children's code-switching reflected their bilingual communicative competence rather than first language loss or second language deficiency. Their code-switching demonstrated an awareness of their interlocutors'linguistic backgrounds, reflected their ethnic and bilingual identity, exhibited their metalinguistic awareness of the two languages, showed their communicative competence, and displayed attributes similar to adults'code-switching, such as marking a change in role relationships and using code-switching for conversational purposes.The children's code-switching patterns did not reflect their mothers'code-switching patterns. Two of the children's mothers used Mandarin more frequently than intrasentential code-switching, but their children used intrasentential code-switching way more frequently than Mandarin. The other child's mother used intrasentential code-switching more frequently than Mandarin, yet her child used intersentential code-switching more frequently than intrasentential code-switching. Other socializing factors, as well as the children's ability to produce code-switched utterances and discourse they had not heard before, appeared to influence their code-switching behavior.The trio's English proficiency and their code-switching patterns exhibited a development trend. The more English proficient children code-switched intersententially more frequently than the less proficient child, who produced more intrasentential code-switched utterances. The less proficient child's use of intrasentential code-switching also showed a developmental trend. He progressed from inserting English words into Mandarin to inserting English formulaic phrases.Contrary to the researcher's expectation, physical settings did not emerge as a primary determinant of the children's language choice. Further research needs to explore the role of settings in bilingual children's use of code-switching because the children in this study tended to associate language with relatively constant participants across the settings, probably this kind of consistency leads to a inertia in the trio's code-switching behavior. Code-switching is a natural consequence of language contact, which cannot be avoided in the world of today which is featured by comparatively frequent contact between different nations and cultures. Thus it should be taken as a normal linguistic and social phenomenon, and no bias should be held towards the existence and use of it.