Translanguaging or code-switching?

Recent popularity of “translanguaging” as a concept referring to bilingual practices has challenged the appropriateness of “code-switching” – the term that has been most influential in studies of bilingualism and language mixing. Reassessing the literature on Cantonese-English mixing in Hong Kong, this paper suggests that the kind of spontaneous code-switching in peer talk, largely intra-sentential (or intra-clausal) and intra-turn, can indeed be recast as translanguaging, where speakers transcend language boundaries between Cantonese and English for the purpose of meaning-making. Nevertheless, Hong Kong speakers do constantly draw language boundaries by marking words as English or Cantonese, both in metalinguistic judgment and in real-time language production. Revisiting an unpublished dataset of radio talk, this paper further illustrates a number of sequences in which Cantonese speakers may “languagise” the code-switched words or expressions as “English”. It is concluded that, in a Conversation-Analytic understanding, the difference between “translanguaging” and “code-switching” boils down to “languagising”, and the contrast between the two notions may have been overstated.

GALLERY WALK+PEER TALK IN LANGUAGE TESTING AND ASSESSMENT: STUDENTS’ PERSPECTIVES

A useful conceptual understanding of ZPD can benefit the students from having talks with others in increasing their capability of knowing something. This idea of social constructivism underpins the need for opportunities for collaboration and support, and for learning. Individuals are required to construct self-knowledge and develop new perspectives, by engaging in hands-on activities rather than using structured information. If peer talk is combined with gallery walk where the students have the opportunity to share ideas, the combination bears such an active class activity. This study reveals the students’ achievements on how they negotiate their problems through conversing with each other. The problem-based conversation plays among students themselves in their initial academic development. This study supports theory highlighting the importance of talk in social interaction as a prerequisite for increasing students’ achievement. The results of this study show that the combination of gallery walk-peer talk able to improve the students’ achievements and also the students’ participation in class. The results also uncovers why they enjoy learning by doing gallery walk-peer talk.

Complexity and density of Hebrew verbs in preschool peer talk

Hebrew verbs were analyzed in the peer talk produced by 36 Hebrew-speaking children in two age/schooling groups (4;0–5;0 and 5;0–6;0 years), and from two socio-economic backgrounds (SES), mid-high and low. Each of the four age/SES groups consisted of nine children in three triads, where each triad was recorded for 30 minutes while playing. The interface of lexical and morphological growth was demonstrated in the developing organization of verbs in terms of roots, binyan conjugations and derivational families. SES was found the major source of variation in all measures, indicating a smaller and less specific verb lexicon in the low SES groups. Network analyses, a novel methodological approach, revealed the internal structure of the verb category in each age/SES cell, pointing to a scarce and less complex verb lexicon of the low SES groups. These measures also accounted for the growth potential of the network, increasing from the younger low SES group at one pole and peaking in the older mid-high SES at the other pole. These quantitative and qualitative differences in the morphological make-up of the verb lexicon and its usage patterns in preschool peer talk have implications for the impact of SES on verb learning in Hebrew.

Silenced Partners: Language Learning and the Role of Bilingual Peers in High School

Background In schools, a major obstacle to drawing on emergent bilingual students’ knowledge and skills in their first language is a widespread lack of awareness about language use among adolescent English learners, including how peer talk can connect knowledge and abilities in both languages to school-based learning. Although research often acknowledges the importance of engaging students’ home language and culture to bridge to academic literacies in English, few have explicitly examined bilingual peer talk as a resource for language learning during adolescence. Purpose This study explores how emergent bilinguals engaged multiple linguistic codes to scaffold their own academic language development with peer support. Research Design Ethnography and discourse analysis of student interactions were used to contextualize and analyze the academic language use of four Spanish-speaking adolescent immigrant students, taking into account the affordances of classroom discourse structures and peer talk. Conclusions The study describes the linguistic resources available to Spanish-speaking adolescent immigrant students through their peers and shows that emergent bilingual youth used academic language in both Spanish and English most frequently—and in more elaborated interactions—while off-task or in less supervised spaces. Classroom discourse structures often limited student participation, particularly when students used nonstandard linguistic codes.