Code-Switching Practices among Immigrant Polish L2 Users of English



Abstract

The present paper aims to present a qualitative study on code-switching practices among L2 users immersed in the L2 culture. Code-switching practices were measured among 62 Polish L2 users of English who had immigrated to the UK and Ireland and reported using English on everyday basis. The informants of the study were to answer an open question concerning situations in which they switch from their L2 to L1 most frequently. The analysis of the results reviled that the participants reported code switching mostly in emotionally charged situations as well as when discussing personal topics with known interlocutors.  The results of the study are in line with some quantitative studies (Dewaele, 2010) as well as some autobiographical findings (Grosjean, 2010, Pavlenko, 2004, Wierzbicka, 2004) and shed some more light on a complex notion of bilingualism and code-switching.


Keywords

code-switching; bilingualism; immersion; L2 use

Altarriba, Jeanette. 2003. Does cariño equal “liking”? A theoretical approach to conceptual nonequivalence between languages. International Journal of Bilingualism, 7, 305-322.

Altarriba, Jeanette. & Heredia, Roberto. R. (eds.) 2008. An introduction to Bilingualism: Principles and Processes. New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Chan, Brian. H. S. 2004. Beyond “contextualization”: Code-switching as a “textualization” cue. Journal of Language and Social psychology, 23, 7-27.

Dewaele, Jean.-Marc. 2004. The emotional force of swearwords and taboo words in the speech of multilinguals. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25 (2-3): 204-223.

Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 2005. Investigating the Psychological and Emotional Dimensions in Instructed Language Learning: Obstacles and Possibilities. The Modern Language Journal, 89 (iii) 367-380.

Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 2006. Expressing anger in multiple languages. In A. Pavlenko (Ed.)Bilingual Minds: Emotional Experience, Expression and Representation (118-151) Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd.

Dewaele, Jean.-Marc. 2008. Dynamic emotion concepts of L2 learners and L2 users: A Second Language Acquisition perspective. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11: 173-175.

Dewaele, Jean-Marc. 2010. Emotions in multiple languages. Basingstoke: Palgrave-MacMillan.

Fishman, Joshua. A. 1965. Who speaks what to whom and when? La Linguistique 2, 67-88.

Grosjean, Francois. 2001. The bilingual's language modes. In Nicol, J. (Ed.). One Mind, Two Languages: Bilingual Language Processing (pp. 1-22). Oxford: Blackwell.

Grosjean, Francois. 2010. Bilingual: Life and Reality. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press

Heredia, Roberto.R., & Altarriba, Jeanette. 2001. Bilingual language mixing: Why do bilinguals code-switch? Current Directions in Psychological Science, 10, 164-168.

Hoffman, Eva. 1998. Lost in Translation: A life in a New Language. Vintage: London.

Li, Wei. (Ed.) 2000. The Bilingualism Reader. London: Routledge.

Li, Wei. (Ed.) 2007. The Bilingualism Reader. (2nd edition). London: Routledge.

Myers-Scotton, Carol. 1993. Social Motivations for Codeswitching: Evidence from Africa. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Nilep, Chad. 2006. ‘Code Switching' in Sociocultural Linguistics. Colorado Research in Linguistics, 19, 1-22.

Ożańska-Ponikwia, Katarzyna. 2012 What has personality and emotional intelligence to do with ‘Feeling different’ while using a foreign language? International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism, 15:2, 217- 234.

Ożańska-Ponikwia, Katarzyna. 2013. Emotions from a Bilingual Point of View. Personality and Emotional Intelligence in Relation to Perception and Expression of Emotions in the L1 and L2. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Panayiotou, Alexia. 2004. Switching Codes, Switching Code: Bilinguals’ Emotional Responses in English and Greek. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development Vol. 25 (2 & 3), 124-139.

Pavlenko, Aneta. 2004. "Stop doing that, ia komu skazala!: Emotions and language choice in bilingual families." Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 25 (1, 2/3), 179-203.

Pavlenko, Aneta. 2008. Emotion and emotion-laden words in the bilingual lexicon. Keynote article. Bilingualism: Language and Cognition, 11 (2), 147-164.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 1999. Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and universals. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Wierzbicka, Anna. 2004. Bilingual lives, bilingual experience. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development. 25(2&3), 94-104. (Preface to the Special edition on "Bilingualism and emotions" edited by Jean-Marc Dewaele and Aneta Pavlenko)

Wilson, Rosemary. J. 2008. ‘Another language is another soul’: individual differences in the presentation of self in a foreign language. Unpublished doctorial dissertation. Birkbeck College, University of London.


Published : 2016-06-25


Ożańska-PonikwiaK. (2016). Code-Switching Practices among Immigrant Polish L2 Users of English. Theory and Practice of Second Language Acquisition, 2(1). Retrieved from https://journals.us.edu.pl/index.php/TAPSLA/article/view/3944

Katarzyna Ożańska-Ponikwia  k.ozanskaponikwia@gmail.com
University of Bielsko-Biala  Poland
Katarzyna Ożańska-Ponikwia works as the Assistant Professor at the University of Bielsko-Biała, Poland. Her main research interests include bilingualism as well as the relationship between personality traits, emotional
intelligence and perception/expression of emotions. She has published a book Emotions from a Bilingual Point of View. Personality and Emotional Intelligence in Relation to Perception and Expression of Emotions in the L1 and L2 (2013). She has also published in international journals of the fields of bilingualism and second language acquisition.



The Copyright Holders of the submitted texts are the Authors. The Reader is granted the rights to use the material available in the TAPSLA websites and pdf documents under the provisions of the Creative Commons 4.0 International License: Attribution - Share Alike  (CC BY-SA 4.0). The user is free to copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and to remix, transform, and build upon the material for any purpose, even commercially.

1. License

The University of Silesia Press provides immediate open access to journal’s content under the Creative Commons BY-SA 4.0 license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/). Authors who publish with this journal retain all copyrights and agree to the terms of the above-mentioned CC BY-SA 4.0 license.

2. Author’s Warranties

The author warrants that the article is original, written by stated author/s, has not been published before, contains no unlawful statements, does not infringe the rights of others, is subject to copyright that is vested exclusively in the author and free of any third party rights, and that any necessary written permissions to quote from other sources have been obtained by the author/s.

If the article contains illustrative material (drawings, photos, graphs, maps), the author declares that the said works are of his authorship, they do not infringe the rights of the third party (including personal rights, i.a. the authorization to reproduce physical likeness) and the author holds exclusive proprietary copyrights. The author publishes the above works as part of the article under the licence "Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International".

ATTENTION! When the legal situation of the illustrative material has not been determined and the necessary consent has not been granted by the proprietary copyrights holders, the submitted material will not be accepted for editorial process. At the same time the author takes full responsibility for providing false data (this also regards covering the costs incurred by the University of Silesia Press and financial claims of the third party).

3. User Rights

Under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, the users are free to share (copy, distribute and transmit the contribution) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) the article for any purpose, provided they attribute the contribution in the manner specified by the author or licensor.

4. Co-Authorship

If the article was prepared jointly with other authors, the signatory of this form warrants that he/she has been authorized by all co-authors to sign this agreement on their behalf, and agrees to inform his/her co-authors of the terms of this agreement.

I hereby declare that in the event of withdrawal of the text from the publishing process or submitting it to another publisher without agreement from the editorial office, I agree to cover all costs incurred by the University of Silesia in connection with my application.