Argumentative Essay On Code Switching

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In various societies, people use several different languages in conversations between their friends, family and peers. Especially in Singapore, it is not an unfamiliar phenomenon to hear two or more bilingual speakers speaking and code switching between the language English and Chinese, English and Malay, English and Tamil or even Standard English and Singaporean English to each other in a natural and effortless manner. In this line, I have mechanistically relate speech varieties with “codes” and despite having a vast variety of definitions for code switching to choose from; I have decided to use Heller’s definition. Heller (1988) defines code switching as the alternating between two or more languages in a single sentence or conversation. During this phenomenon, it is common for individuals to fluently use more than one language in a course of a single communication episode. When this happens, bilinguals are not coached in how to code switch, but instead, they rely on unconscious linguistic understanding in differentiating between what are tolerable and intolerable code switching usages. According to Auer (1989), factors such as cultural interaction, intercultural marriage, education, and colonization are some influences for code switching. Moreover, speakers may choose to alternate from one code to another, either to distinguish oneself, to show commonality with a social group, to discuss a certain topic, join in social happenstances, to impress and influence the audience or to express feelings and affections (Crystal, 1987). However, there has been a misconception in many people’s perception, that “code switching is bad”, “code switching creates confusion” and that “code switching will result in a language deficit where individ...

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...ly proven research that proves code switching to be a cause of delayed speech or cognition (De Houwer, 1999). However, it has been proven that being able to code switch between languages in a conversation benefits one cognitively, academically, as well as linguistically, as the individual have a larger and wider vocabulary, lexical terms, and phrases to choose from to convey a message (Skiba, 1997; Bialystok, 2001). Futhermore, by engaging in code switching, it also promotes cross cultural appreciaton and uniqueness (King & Fogle, 2006), where it can be embraced during the process of alternating between two languages in a conversation. Additionally, in my opinion, code switching should be cogitated as a spoken skill as it requires a high degree of linguistic proficiency rather than a weakness of consuming inadequate knowledge of one or the other language being used.

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