Making Space for Bilingual Communicative Practice

Abstract

This paper argues that bilingual communication should not be conceived of as something distinct from everyday communicative interaction. Monolingual and bilingual children do not differ in what they do with language, but in how they do it. Whereas monolinguals rely on style switching and voicing, bilinguals employ these strategies in addition to their bilingual resources. Code-switching for bilinguals serves as an indexical strategy which functions much like other similar discourse level processes. We will demonstrate that classroom peer group talk creates an interactional space in which students are free to use all their bilingual resources. Such a safe space provides them an opportunity to talk about grammatical and comprehension issues. Code-switching becomes a resource which allows children to deal with their school tasks by applying their own peer group communicative knowledge (Gumperz, Cook-Gumperz and Szymanski 1999).

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