Abstract:

The article highlights the nature of code switching that is believed to be a manifestation of emergent bilingualism in the English-teaching classroom.

The emergent bilingualism is the functioning of two language and cultural codes in mind while performing cognitive tasks in class, communicating with teachers and peers, while finding communicative solutions out of the classroom, while doing independent activities of entertaining and cognitive character. The emergent bilingualism is an issue of growing interest and controversy in both linguistics and methods of teaching a foreign language. Scholars and teachers take two contrasted positions concerning the emergent bilingualism: bracketing, i.e. banning the native language in the classroom, and scaffolding, i.e. including the mother tongue into the pedagogical support of the foreign language course. It should be emphasized that emergent bilingualism is characteristic for those students who learn a foreign language in the mother tongue environment or whose foreign language competence is at its initial stage.

The major forms of emergent bilingualism manifestation are code switching and translanguage. Code switching takes place when teachers and students choose themselves to switch from a target language to their mother tongue whereas translanguage is deliberate combination of foreign literature and the mother tongue literature at certain stages in learning in order to broaden the students’ outlook, to enhance their personal involvement and to correlate their personal experience with the educational content.

The phenomenon of code switching is determined in the article from the point of view of its sociolinguistic, psycholinguistic, and linguistic features. The research proved that if the bans and limitations on the use of the mother tongue in class are eliminated, code switching will inevitably occur at such phases of a lesson as: teachers’ encouraging the feedback to make sure they are understood correctly, deciding on administrative and organizational affairs, explaining the difficult theoretical material. Thus, code switching may be said to perform pedagogical and administrative functions in the foreign language classroom, it can be used as a strategy to accelerate the educational process, to better understand the target language and to create a favourable educational environment. But as the student’s foreign language competence increases it makes sense to reduce the intensity of the native language help.

Keywords:

Code switching, emergent bilingualism, mother tongue, target language, foreign language teaching, teaching English as a foreign language.