Code Switching In Bilingual Children

Bilingual children are confused

The society always got confused between code switching and language interference among the bilinguals. Especially to the monolinguals, mixing two or more languages in a conversation is a sign of language deficit and it shows disrespect to the culture as well as the language. As a matter of fact, language interference is linguistic interference that come from their native language that affect in phonology, grammar, lexis and orthography in their second language output, while code switching simply means when a speaker use or mix two or more languages in a sentence or conversation to another bilingual person (Cit 1). The way bilingual children mix up different languages has risen the fear among the parents because

According to researchers, this is commonly known as code switching and, this is a normal part of language learning progress among the bilinguals (citation2). There is nothing to be worried or panic about when code switching happens, it doesn’t mean that a child is confused and cannot distinguish different languages. The only time a child needed to be corrected is when code switching happens too frequently and especially when a child speaks in different languages talking to someone who is monolingual. In spite of that, a child will tend to use or mix different languages in a conversation only when they are in a bilingual situation, like talking to a bilingual mother at home. If a child is in a monolingual condition, the child will quickly learn to use the only one language that is essential for communication, just like talking to grandmother who can only speak one language, the child would never try to use the language that his grandmother doesn’t understand. Over time, these bilingual children will learn to find himself to adapt in bilingual and

If a monolingual measure was applied to test a bilingual child, then surely the result will show false data and a delay among them. A child’s vocabulary knowledge is spread in two parts in language that is explained in the iceberg analogy suggested by Cummins, therefore testing a bilingual child on only one of the language is mostly accessing only part of a child’s knowledge instead of testing a child’s overall language ability. Another challenge the researchers faced was that bilingual children are different in term of language dominance, children have different variability in language dominance because bilingual children often have a dominant language that is stronger that the other. The dominance of language in bilingual children is subject to their exposure to the language within the environment they grow up. For example, if a Thai child grew up in a bilingual environment whose parents speak English to each other, then the child will tend to be more dominant in English than Thai. According to test result from a research, bilingual children know approximately the same amount of vocabulary as the monolinguals, also test sure proved that leaning more than one language does not slow down lexical development in bilingual children. (Houwer, Bornstein, & Putnick,