Poster #116 - Teacher’s Codeswitching and Bilingual Children’s Mother Tongue Language Learning and Cognitive Switching Flexibility

• In Event: 3-053 - Poster Session 10
  In Poster Session: PS 10 Section - Language, Communication

Integrative Statement

To codeswitch or not to codeswitch, that is a dilemma for many bilingual language teachers, especially for those in heritage language class (Chavez, 2016; McMillan & Rivers, 2011). The current study focus on mother tongue language (MTL) classes in Singapore, and intends to explore the immediate and long-term impact of teacher’s codeswitching on child bilingual’s language and cognitive development. Three questions have been addressed in our study:
1. What is the relationship between teacher's classroom codeswitching to children's language use?
2. What is the impact of teacher's codeswitching on children's vocabulary development?
3. What is the impact of teacher’s codeswitching on children’s cognitive switching flexibility?
20 preschool teachers’ MTL classes (10 in Mandarin, 6 in Malay, and 4 in Tamil) were recorded, and their utterances with the 173 bilingual preschoolers (4-5 years old) have been transcribed and coded with CLAN for their codeswitching frequency and type (i.e., MTL-only, inter-sentential codeswitching, and intra-sentential codeswitching). Children’s receptive vocabulary and cognitive switching flexibility have been assessed at Kindergarten 1 and Kindergarten 2 with Bilingual Language Assessment Battery (Sze & Rickard-Liow, 2008) and Dimensional Change Card Sort (Slotkin et al., 2012). The descriptive statistics have been demonstrated in Table 1. Pearson correlation and linear mixed effects models have been used to explore the answers to the three questions. Results demonstrated codeswitching takes a small proportion of teacher’s language use in MTL class on average, however, there is a substantial variation among teachers. Children’s language use pattern is similar to that of teachers: they have used substantially more MTL-only utterances (M=8.21, SD=3.35) than English-only utterances (i.e., inter-sentential; M=1.26, SD=1.15) and mixed languages utterances (i.e., intra-sentential; M=0.45, SD=0.52). Compared to the teachers, children seem to prefer to codeswitching on the whole utterance level. Teachers’ inter-sentential codeswitching was found to negatively and nearly significantly influence children’s receptive vocabulary development (Table 2a). This type of codeswitching may benefit children with higher initial MTL vocabulary more. In contrast to the impact on children’s vocabulary learning, teacher’s inter-sentential codeswitching has been found to facilitate children’s switching development (Table 2b). Those children with lower initial switching flexibility would benefit more from teachers’ inter-sentential codeswitching. Our findings reveals the multifaceted impact of teacher’s codeswitching on children’s early development. The function of MTL teacher’s codeswitching has been called for special attention at the end of our study.

Authors

• He Sun, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
  Presenting Author

• Nurul Yussof, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Poorani Vijayakumar, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Ong Quan He, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Gaby Lai, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author

• Beth Ann O'Brien, National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University
  Non-Presenting Author