Contributions to Language

Learning

Code-mixing as a language learning strategy

Name: Aporcăriți Andreea

Year/group: RE-A, 3rd year
 Code-mixing as a language learning strategy

Introduction:

Language learning strategies is a term that has not received a hard-and-fast definition yet.
Many attempts have been made to define it, and still researchers have not reached common
ground on the matter. According to Ellis (1944: 533), ‘[s]trategies can be defined as
production sets that exist as declarative knowledge and are used to solve some learning
problem.’ For van Lier (1988: 30), they are ‘ways of dealing with problems, thus, the more
problems, the more we need to use strategies’.

Bilingualism has been defined in various ways, but the most comprehensive definition I have
found comes from T. K. Bhatia and W. C. Ritchie (2013): “[b]ilingualism and multilingualism
refer to the knowledge and use of two languages and the knowledge and use of three or more
languages.”

Along the same lines, it is Li’s (2008, in Cenoz, 2013) definition: “[a] bilingual is anyone who
can communicate in more than one language, be it active (through speaking and writing) or
passive (through listening and reading).”

If we narrow down the discussion and strictly refer to the Romanian society, it is characterized
by multilingualism. Romanian people can speak up to three or four foreign languages.

Li Wei (2008: 34), “code-switching is an extremely common practice among bilinguals and
takes many forms.” Code-mixing is a multifaceted phenomenon that usually comes across in
different forms. One of the forms code-mixing may take involves words and phrases from two
languages occurring within the frame of a sentence. Another form that code-mixing may take
is represented by sentences beginning in one language and finishing in another. And last but
not least, large chunks of text can be split in different parts, and every part is in another
language.

Hypothesis: Code-mixing is one of the most used learning strategies by learners at all levels,
but it is by far more frequently encountered in the incipient stages of the learning process.
Research Questions:

1. What form does code-switching take?

2. Are Poplack’s constraints valid?
3. Who tends to switch more often: the teacher or the pupils?

Method: Participant observation

Instruments: I went to their classes and recorded every student-teacher interaction.

Informants: They were foreign students learning Romanian as a second language. The
number of participants was 5, of which 3 were coming from English-speaking countries. I
went to their classes for one whole year. They took Romanian language classes five times a
week in the first semester, while on the other three times a week.

Data: I recorded all the interactions between the teacher and the pupils in order to determine
what language strategy would be more frequently used. I paid special attention to the use of
code-mixing as a language learning strategy.

Conclusion: Students engaged in code-mixing far more often in the first semester when they
just started learning Romanian. The students engaged in code-mixing almost at all times
throughout the lectures. The teacher also used English on a regular basis.

On the other hand, when the second semester came, they did not turn so often to code-mixing.
That is because their language level had considerably improved. The teacher also engaged in
code-mixing less frequently if we compared it to the previous semester.

As expected, the students will completely switch to English in the first semester, while in the
second one, they will either begin a sentence in one language and continue in the other one, or
they will insert words or phrases from one language into the other.

In what regards Poplack’s constraints, both the equivalence and free morpheme constraints
were violated.

References:

1. Bhatia, T. & Ritchie, W. (2013). The Handbook of Bilingualism and Multilingualism.

Blackwell Publishing.
2. Ellis, R. (1985). Understanding Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: OUP (pp.4-18)
3. Ellis, R. (1994). The Study of Second Language Acquisition. Oxford: OUP (pp.6-12)
4. van Lier, Leo. (2004). Ecology and Semiotics of Language Learning: A Sociocultural
Perspective. Boston & Dordrecht: Kluwer.
5. Wei, L. & Moyer, M. (2008). The Blackwell Guide to Research Methods in
Bilingualism and Multilingualism. Blackwell Publishing.