Documents attitudes toward English, Spanish, and Spanish-English code-switching in Juarez, Mexico. This paper refutes the notion that there are two orientations--integrative and instrumental--toward English as a second language, but it supports assumptions regarding the relationship between attitudes and use and the impact of local milieu on…

This paper illustrates increases in the use of English in political speeches in post-Suharto Indonesia by analyzing the phonological, morphological, and syntactic assimilation of loanwords (linguistic borrowing), as well as hybridization and code switching, and phenomena such as doubling and loan translations. The paper also examines the mixed…

Twelve university students were asked not to speak English for one day; record examples of English words they wanted to use, write a reflective diary; and discuss their experiences in a group interview. Data include diary entries in English and a transcription of the interview conducted in Cantonese-English mixed code. All students experienced…

Discusses the major language shift in Singapore from the familial use of varieties of Chinese other than Mandarin towards the languages of education, English and Mandarin. An ethnographic study is presented of a Singaporean Chinese family that has moved from Cantonese to English, and the underlying pressures leading to this shift are examined. (19…

Discusses use of the mother tongue in bilingual content teaching as well as in conventional foreign-language classes. The controversy over mother tongue is examined by analyzing a history lesson taught in English as a foreign language. Suggests brief use of the mother tongue can function as a learning aid to enhance communicative competence in the…

Explores pragmatic dimensions of code switching by first-grade Korean-American schoolchildren. Growing up as members of the Korean immigrant community in New York City, the children all entered school with Korean as their mother tongue, and at the same time of the investigation alternated between English and Korean. (Author/VWL)

Seeks to establish connections between two different language contact phenomena, interlanguage, and code switching. Data for the study come from an interlanguage corpus that has English as the target language, but also contains material from the speaker's two first languages, Spanish and German; and a German-English code switching corpus…

Explores how the story "The Raja's Big Ears" traveled from Gujerat in India, where it is a well-known folktale, via a skilled story teller, to London, where it was transformed through contact with the multicultural world of London school children. (Author/VWL)

There are pros and cons to the use of a concurrent approach, that is using two or more languages in the same context. The new concurrent approach (NCA) advocated here resulted from a desire to bring together the child's two languages in a way that would further the child's language development and, at the same time, lead to satisfactory school…

Using the ethnomethodological and conversation-analytic perspectives, this study points out some directions for the sociological and linguistic analyses of simulation-games based on inspection of video-recordings of actual examples of second language learner game participation. (Author/SED)

Discusses the major directions taken by Sri Lankan English fiction in the 1980's in developing style ranges appropriate for the expression of new social realities. Four works of fiction are used to illustrate progress towards this goal. (42 references) (Author/OD)

Reviews the major works on code switching in Hong Kong to date. Four context-specific motivations commonly found in the Hong Kong Chinese Press--euphemism, specificity, bilingual punning, and principle of economy--are adduced to show that English is one of the important linguistic resources used by Chinese Hongkongers to fulfill a variety of…

A growing body of research recognizes the pervasive difficulties involved in accommodating multilingual practices in the English language classroom and acknowledges that one aspect of this conundrum is the role that languages play in the constitution of student identities. Such studies point to how students use off-stage spaces to covertly engage…

A study investigated the general occurrence of English lexical elements in the recorded speech of 285 Dutch pre-World War I immigrants and their descendants in Massachusetts, Iowa, and Wisconsin. The problems encountered in analyzing a massive data corpus and the methods used to resolve these problems are the focus of the paper. The difficulties…

Examples of cross cultural misunderstandings are examined in this paper to show how cultural (contextual) meaning must be regarded as an integral feature of the overall semantic meaning of an utterance. The examples, taken from the Filipino dialect Tagalog, illustrate how ignorance of the cultural assumptions and attitudes associated with an…