03 Jun Turkish Immigrant Children’s Bilingual Language Practice
Seyda Tarim (Gevirtz School of Education, UCSB)
Friday, June 3 / 1:30-3:30 PM
Educ 1205
This paper examines how Turkish-English bilingual children make use of code-switching to accomplish a variety of actions within their classroom or recess activities at a multiethnic elementary school and at a Turkish Cultural Center’s Saturday School in Arizona. The children’s peer interactions were audiorecorded, videorecorded and complemented by detailed fieldnotes. The data were analyzed using techniques of talk-in-interaction and ethnography. The data reveal that Turkish-English bilingual children’s frequent uses of bilingual practices with one another, construct a hybrid Turkish-American identity (Zentella, 1997) for themselves but not when in the view of the adults at the cultural center. For the young bilinguals in this study, code-switching may serve as their ‘we-code’, marking their membership in a bilingual peer or youth group (See Jorgensen, 1998)The children’s language choices in their interactions provide important insights in terms of linking these
local practices to cultural and linguistic reproduction and change (see Garrett & Baquendano-Lopez 2002; Kyratzis, Reynolds, and Evaldsson, 2010; Schieffelin 2003). Similar to Paugh’ (2005) findings, their differential language use when interacting with each other or with adults may reproduce more broadly held ideologies about the languages, the people who use them, and appropriate social spaces for their use” (p.79).
Seyda Tarim is a doctoral candidate in the Gevirtz School of Education, UCSB.
Sponsored by the IHC’s LISO RFG.
Website: http://www.liso.ucsb.edu/event.html?e=56