Code switching & Code meshing

Figure 1. Language proficiency and lexical access

          One particular translanguaging phenomenon of multilingual speakers is code switching and code meshing. It is believed that multilingual speakers have all of their language codes integrated in one repertoire, and when communicating, all the linguistic codes are activated together. Thus, code mixing/translanguaging is considered as naturally inevitable practices. On the other hand, since both languages are potentially active and competing to control output, Applied linguists of bilingualism indicated that language switching takes time because (1) it involves a change in language schema for a given task (schema level inhibition), (2) any change of language involves overcoming the inhibition of the active lemmas with non-target tags (tag inhibition) (Green, 1998, p. 73); (3) cost of switching is asymmetric, and switching into dominant codes costs more than the reverse direction; and (4) the bility to engage in fluent code switching is a hallmark of high proficiency in two languages (Miccio et al. 2009), given that successful and fluent code switching requires a high degree of knowledge of and sensitivity to the grammatical constraints of both languages (kroll et al, 2015).
          If our brain is prone to take the most economic course when
communicating, and if code switching and code meshing cost cognitive capacity, they may not always be the economic selection of multilingual speakers. I hypothesize that some codes may involve more switch cost (e.g. language specific codes, numeral codes, & functional lexical lemmas)  but some may be triggered more spontaneously (e.g. shared content lexical lemmas) (See Figure 2); different language proficiency may result in different cost of language switch (See figure 1); explicit training of code switch may reduce switch cost; contexts that allow more flexible code mixing can reduce unpredictable switching and lead to less lexical suppression (for the more suppressed codes take longer to switch into); and code-switching/meshing from L2 to L1 when composing L2 writing can be ineffective, especially for high proficiency students who have direct access to L2 codes but need to intentionally use L1 during L2 production.

The Modified Hierarchical Model. A. Pavlenko (2009), Conceptual representation in the bilingual lexicon and second language vocabulary learning. In A. Pavlenko (ed.), The bilingual mental lexicon: Interdisciplinary approaches , p. 147. Multilingual Matters, Buffalo, NY. 

          I also would like to propose a broader definition of code-meshing that it refers to meshing two or more codes as a whole at not only the level of lexicon, but phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics. For example, Chinglish, under this definition, can be seen as a kind of code-mashing of Chinese and English, which has Chinese syntax and semantics as the base or matrix and bring in English lexemes as the "guest" (e.g.  " I loved a girl at my first sight" ). Given this definition, all the multilingual speakers' language productions are translingual and code-mashed.

Teaching Implications:
1. Since L2 may affect L1, EFL students when writing in L2 dominant contexts may experience reduced access to their L1. I have students complained that code-switching during L2 writing sometimes was not effective. However, most students reported that using L1 to plan before writing is effective. This finding suggests that before the target L2 task schema is activated, L1 can be of great help in idea generation, logic reasoning, and detail elaborations. However, once the L2 task schema is activated, and L1 is inhibited during L2 writing, L1 code-switching may be less effective or even lead to more errors. Therefore, (1) Pre-writing contexts (L1 dominant): teachers can create an L1 contexts triggering L1 writing schema to help students take good use of their L1 resources. (2) Writing contexts (L1 and L2): Do not require students to use certain language when writing. Instead, allowing students to use whatever languages during their processes of drafting. This can allow students to spontaneously use the more strongly activated codes through competing. (3) Post-writing (L2 only): When making final revision/editing, students can then encouraged to use the target language only.
2. EFL writers should not only learn to regulate and control cross-language competition but also learn to shuttle between all the language resources in their repertoires in order to creatively negotiate or mash languages for writing agendas.
3. EFL students with different English proficiency levels can be benefited from L1 differently. Low proficiency writers may be benefited from L1 in lexical search, idea generation, logical reasoning, translating, and monitoring. However, high proficiency writers may prefer to use L1 in idea generation and monitoring. Other usages of L1 during L2 writing may lead to interference for high proficiency writers unless L1 can compensate their situational writing needs.

Week 6 Peer review and reflection paper

          On Week 6, I had my students to do peer review of the draft they composed. Collaborating with professor Canagarajah, I came up with a peer review sheet in which 10 questions were asked. The purposes of the questions, one the one hand, is to elicit information about students' writing processes in relation to their traslingual and rhetorical strategies; on the other hand, the questions can serve as a guideline helping the writers and the reviewers to keep track of their own or the reviewed writings. The ten questions were formulated based on Canagarajah's five formulation questions and four translingual strategies (see my blog article -Week 4).
          Moreover, I designed 5 reflection questions in order to understand students' rhetorical decision, negotiation between L1 and L2, construction of identity, and challenges they encountered.
          I explained the purposes and concerns of peer review since all of my students have never done peer review before. I explained each question of the peer review and the reflection to make sure that they could grasp it. Besides, I demonstrated how I made rhetorical negotiation to compose my idea. I guess my demonstration was quite good for it provided a substantial example accounting for rhetorical negotiation and voice construction.
          I left about 1.5 hours for students to do peer review in class. It is hoped that they could discuss with the writer when reviewing the draft and collaboratively constructed texts from both the writer and reader's perspectives.
          Ten students have turned in their drafts. I was quite anxious about their outcome. And, sigh... I was quite disappointed after reading them. Most of the drafts are too short to carry in-depth reflection and to demonstrate their translingual literacy.  I just wrote an email to my students to encourage them to revise their drafts by next Wednesday, which is the deadline of the final draft.
          Let's see how the final results will turn out to be.

Week 4 writing of autobiography- content & strategies

         On week 4,  I used Canagarajah's autobiography as writing sample to explain content organization and strategies when writing autobiography on one's language learning experience.
          Adopted from Canagarajah (2019), five guide questions were provided for helping students' idea formulation:
1) What are the challenges you faced when learning a new language? 
2) What challenges do writers face for their identity when they develop as multilinguals? 
3)  What strategies do they adopt to negotiate these challenges?  
4) What are the motivations that explain their approaches?  
5) What lessons do writers learn from this experience?

              I also introduced the translingual strategies suggested by Canagarajah (2013)-- 

        1) envoicing: semantic resources used to voice identity

       2) recontextualization: textual strategies that appropriate negotiation of the texts and help 

            readers better understand them.

       3)  interactional: Outputs adopted by writers to facilitate the co-construction of meaning

       4) entextualization: textual strategies that facilitate voice and meaning.

                   Honestly, it was not easy to help these freshmen understand these abstract and complex concepts, such as "identity", "voice", negotiation", "interaction" etc. So, when lecturing, I shifted languages between Mandarin and English in order to make my points clear to them. I also used the writing samples to demonstrate how the formulation questions can lead the story going and how the writers incorporated the four translingual strategies into their texts.
              Concepts of "identity" and "voice" are very foreign to the students because their English writing practices were designed and taught mainly to satisfy the demands of entrance examinations. They rarely had chances to explore how to position themselves in different genres for different purposes. This is also my first time to teach these concepts which used to be the topics only for research purposes. I didn't like my teaching performance. I should have spent more time on discussing "identity" and "voice" and left some time for students to practice how to construct their identity through audience concerns and rhetorically creating a specific voice corresponding to the identity. 

Generative Linguistics and Translingualism

It seems to me that there are a few misconceptions of generative linguistics held by some second language studies or translingualist scholars. These misconceptions are the ones that I personally know of through conversations with friends who work in those fields. They are most likely NOT representative of the fields, but to the extent that these views exist, it might still be worthwhile to point them out. My personal belief is that generative linguistics, second language studies, and translingualism are fundamentally compatible. Most "conflicting views" are in fact due to different understandings of certain terms, different aspects of language they aim to study, and different ultimate goals for their research agendas.

The first misconception is that generative linguistics is normative and prescriptive in nature. This can't be farther from the truth. If one interprets "normative" as having to do with obligation, they will be hard pressed to find any claims of such nature in the linguistic literature. When a linguist says, for example, that it should be ungrammatical to extract a wh-word out of one of two conjuncts in Limonese Creole, the word should only means that, based on what we already know about how language works, there's a high probability that native speakers of Limonese Creole will never form a wh-question sentence in that way. It is essentially a statement of prediction, common in all sciences. That kind of linguistic statement is similar to saying, in physics for instance, that if the temperature of water reaches 100 degrees at one atmosphere of pressure, it should boil.

Compare that with disciplines that do deal with normative issues, such as legal or political philosophy. Here, a statement such as "no citizen of a democratic community should be denied voting rights" is plainly a moral statement, not a prediction, as there have been multiple cases throughout history where certain groups of people were--and still are--in fact denied such rights.

Also, notice that whether a discipline is normative or descriptive doesn't depend on how many factors are typically considered in a research study in that field. Instead, it depends on whether the goal of the study is to describe what really happens / exists (even at an abstract level) or to argue what is morally desirable. Many theories in generative syntax, for example, can sometimes be quite abstract in the sense that many social, cultural, or even processing factors are not taken into account, but that does not mean the goal of this field is not to discover what rules exist in the human mind. This is the same with many laws in physics that, in their formulations, don't take into account certain factors, such as friction. Yet, no one would claim that physics is a normative discipline.

Related to the first misconception, a second one is that everything linguists call "ungrammatical" is a mere violation of some socially-constructed norm or convention of the language. This type of thinking may lead to the conclusion that there is nothing in a language, from spelling to syntactic structure, that can't be negotiated. That said, my impression is that scholars with this view do tend to focus their research only on linguistic patterns that are, for the most part, social conventions. It just so happens that those non-negotiable (presumably biologically-based) linguistic phenomena (e.g., syntactic operations based on hierarchical relations) tend to fall outside those scholars' radar, and the reason for that is probably because no L2 students ever produce the kind of linguistic output that will bring those scholars' attention to such phenomena (e.g., using an entirely linearly-based rule to form a wh-question in English). Therefore, I have little to say on this point.

A third misconception is that the terms native and non-native (and by extension, L1 and L2) used by linguists are now outdated and should be discarded by all researchers of language. These terms, as holders of this view would claim, are hard to define and therefore extremely problematic. Here, one should be careful and ask: "For what purposes are these terms problematic?" In my own field, the notions of native and non-native are commonly accepted criteria for sources of linguistic data. In general, one would not ask someone who, say, started to learn Russian in her late 50's to judge the grammaticality of some Russian sentence, unless the goal of the study is to see whether L2 learners have the same grammaticality judgement as L1 speakers in certain areas of grammar. But even in the latter case, a distinction between L1 and L2 is explicitly assumed.

Some scholars may deny that such a distinction really exists and believe that, given enough time and exposure, all late learners of a language will achieve native proficiency. (And if they don't, it's simply because there hasn't been enough exposure.) I would say that such a denial should be subjected to empirical investigations (or rigorous logical reasoning if no tools for empirical investigations are available) just like all claims in all scientific fields should be. The empirical basis for assuming there is a distinction between L1 and L2 can be easily found in SLA literature, and as far as methodology is concerned, I see no reason to abandon such an assumption, at least in my own field. Of course, it may turn out in the future that all differences observed thus far between so-called L1 and L2 speakers are actually reducible to some environmental effect (e.g., lack of exposure), and that there's nothing qualitatively different between the two groups. Before that day comes (if it ever does), the terms native and non-native will remain useful in generative linguistics, if for no other reason than to make sure the data we gather truly reflect what we aim to discover.

(Incidentally, it is sometimes claimed that the terms are problematic and should be discarded because there exist fuzzy cases where a person achieves native-like proficiency in a language that is not their L1 according to the traditional definition, whatever it may be. To that, I'd say most disciplines have fuzzy cases to which a certain term may not be entirely applicable, but people keep using the term because it is useful in some other cases. It seems obvious to me that this is true of linguistics as well.)

Now, it should be emphasized that just because these terms are useful in one field does not mean it is also useful in other fields, such as language education. One can certainly argue that for educational purposes, imposing labels such as L1 and L2 on students may actually do more harm than good. I will leave this matter to the experts on this site.

Like I said at the beginning, this post is intended to clarify some of the misconceptions I have seen, and they may not be representative of the general views of those in the second language studies and translingualism communities. Hopefully it will provide some food for thought nonetheless.