Codeswitching to Work Across Linguistic Differences

While many students spoke of feeling excluded when working in linguistically diverse groups, others had positive experiences. For example, one linguistically mixed group in Mrs. Lo's math class worked together very effectively to solve classroom practice problems. When asked by Veronica to explain how the collegiality in their group had been initiated and nurtured, the students had this to say. Solomon was born in Iran and spoke English in the math class. Susie and May were from Taiwan. They spoke English to Solomon and Mandarin to each other and the three other Taiwanese students in the group. The seventh member of the group was Mario, a White Euro-Canadian who was born in Italy and spoke English in the class.

Veronica: So we wanted to find out how this collaborative effort of helping each other started.

Solomon: Well, they [Susie, Cindy, and May, three Taiwanese girls] are very attractive, right? So ... there's no other way around it.

(Susie and May laugh).

Susie: Sure. That was something!

Solomon: Every time I tell a joke [in English], they [Susie and May] translate it to her [Cindy, who isn't as proficient in English as Susie and May] and it's like an echo. Ten minutes later, she [Cindy] gets it.

Veronica: And he [James, one of the two Taiwanese boys] gets it and he starts laughing. [Exchange, July 25, 1994]

The students at this linguistically mixed table codeswitched from English to Mandarin to share jokes and maintain the collegiality necessary for solving math problems together. Here, Mrs. Lo's hope for positive interpersonal and interracial interaction was momentarily realized. Susie and May, who played the role of language brokers were at the center of this successful negotiation of linguistic difference. However, there were times when it was Solomon's (limited) use of Mandarin that was important in building and maintaining collegiality. Several times during our observations, the five Mandarin-speaking students would socialize in Mandarin for extended periods of time. Not being able to join in these social conversations, Solomon would interrupt them by asking Susie or May for the time in Mandarin. This was a question that he had asked Susie to teach him early on in the course. Solomon's request for the time in Mandarin, which was always received with laughter, let the Mandarin speakers know that he wanted to join in the conversation. Each time Solomon interrupted a Mandarin conversation by asking for the time, the conversation would resume in English. Susie, May, and Solomon's practice of codeswitching during classroom practice provided all of the students at their table with an effective way responding to the issue of exclusion raised by Miriam and Lianne. In asking for the time in Mandarin, instead of asking if the members of the group could speak English or get to work, Solomon was able to work across linguistic differences in a way that other students were not.¹

Commenting on this strategy sociolinguist Angel Lin (personal communication) suggested that Solomon's codeswitching worked because it invoked a different "storyline" than the one imposed by the school's institutional English dominance. In this storyline, Solomon, as an English speaker, was willing to learn the others' language. His act of asking for the time in Mandarin invoked a storyline that assumed an egalitarian, mutually respectful, reciprocal relationship in which both parties were interested in each other's languages and cultures.²

The issue of exclusion in group work was discussed time and time again in our interviews with teachers and students at Northside. The difficulty of dealing with the issue in positive ways was one of the reasons monolingual English-speaking students and teachers expressed a desire for English monolingualism in their classrooms. In the pedagogical discussion that follows, I look at the way one of the Northside teachers dealt with the issue of exclusion in small group work.

In addition to tension around student multilingualism in group work, there was also some tension around the teachers' use of languages other than English in their classrooms. To illustrate, Max Yeung, one of the Canton ese-speaking students in Mrs. Lo's math class, talked to us about his concern for the Canadian students (those born in Canada) who may have felt alienated or angered by the use of Cantonese and Mandarin in the classroom. Max suggested that even though Mrs. Lo was good at speaking Mandarin, Cantonese, and English, "maybe the Canadian students don't feel very well, sometimes ... Canadians are multicultural and they know that, but they don't prefer that situation." This concern had an influence on Max's own language practices with Mrs. Lo. Whenever there were English-speaking students within hearing distance, he accommodated their linguistic practices by speaking to the teacher in English. Max used English, even though he preferred working in Cantonese, and Mrs. Lo was able and willing to help him in Cantonese.

Max's concern about English-speaking students feeling angry or alienated by the use of languages other than English was substantiated in an interview with a student from Mrs. Lo's class who did not speak Cantonese or Mandarin. Theresa Lubov, a White, Euro-Canadian student who had been born in Russia and had learned English as a second language, told us that she got frustrated when she asked Mrs. Lo a question about a math problem and Mrs. Lo was not able to explain it clearly. When she heard Mrs. Lo helping students in Cantonese or Mandarin, she felt as though they had "more advantage" than she did. Underlying this perception of the Cantonese and Mandarin speakers having more advantage was the assumption that the reason that Mrs. Lo's explanations were clearer when she explained a problem to the Cantonese and Mandarin speakers because she was able to use her first and second languages rather than English, which was her third language.

What Theresa had not examined here was the possibility that her difficulty with understanding Mrs. Lo's explanations had to do with issues around her own learning. Earlier in our interview, Theresa had spoken candidly about the difficulty she was having focusing on her academic work and completing it outside of class time. However, the fact that Theresa perceived herself as less advantaged than the Cantonese and Mandarin speakers in the class presented a dilemma for both Max and Mrs. Lo. While Mrs. Lo's use of languages other than English in the private spaces of her classroom was beneficial for ESOL students like Max, it could also result in other students feeling linguistically disadvantaged despite the fact that they could access assistance in English. As mentioned earlier, Max's strategy for managing interethnic/interracial tensions arising from multilingualism in the classroom was to accommodate the English-speaking students at the expense of his own language preference and learning. For teachers like Mrs. Lo, who believed it was important for students like Max to be able to use his primary language of Cantonese if he was stuck, resolving this dilemma in this way was problematic. Further discussion of the ways multilingual teachers might begin to work through this dilemma is taken up in the pedagogical discussion to follow.

This commentary on teaching and learning in languages other than English has looked at the strategy of accepting and legitimizing both student and teacher multilingualism by creating a "shared stage" on the classroom floor. It has also looked at the tensions that can accompany the legitimizing of multilingualism and the way that one group of students worked through the problem of feeling left out. As mentioned in the Introduction, one of the goals is to examine various teaching and learning practices undertaken at Northside in terms of their effectiveness in challenging coercive relations of power and inequities facing ESOL students at the school. A discussion of the way Evelyn Lo's legitimizing of languages other than English can been seen as a challenge to linguistic inequities in multilingual schools is taken up in the Conclusion.

¹ See Rampton (1995) for a discussion on adolescent codeswitching in a multilingual community in England.

² For a discussion of different possible storylines in cross ethnic interactions, see Lin, Wang. Akamatsu, and Riazi (in press).

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