DOES CHILD CODE-SWITCHING DEMONSTRATE COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE?: A COMPARISON OF SIMULTANEOUS AND SEQUENTIAL BILINGUALS

Abstract

Over the past four decades, code-switching (CS) has been established as a mark of
high linguistic competence among adult simultaneous (2L1) bilinguals, those who
acquired two ‘first’ languages before age three. The status of CS among second
language (L2) learners, who learned one language after age three, is much less
clear; children represent an especially understudied population in this line of
inquiry. This study aims to address this research gap and presents a comparison of
child 2L1 bilinguals and child L2 learners in kindergarten, first and second grade of
a Spanish immersion program. Twelve hours of recorded spontaneous classroom
speech were analyzed for grammatical categories, switch points, and conversational
strategies of CS. The results of this study show that the grammatical patterns and
conversational strategies of child L2 learner CS strongly parallel those of 2L1 child
bilinguals, pointing toward a high level of linguistic competence. Based on these
findings, it is suggested that proficiency rather than language background may be a
greater factor in CS patterns. Furthermore, evidence of the strategic use of CS by
2L1 and L2 learners alike suggests the potential benefit of an alternative bilingual
pedagogy, which normalizes the use of CS as a linguistic resource instead of the
more commonly evoked ‘deficit perspective’ on L2 learner CS.