Supporting bilingual development through code-switching: Dual language use of a grandmother and an emergent bilingual child

Children exposed predominantly to a heritage language at home usually find it difficult to fit into environments where a societal language is used. In this case study, a Cantonese-English bilingual grandmother in western Canada, concerned about her grandson's lack of interaction at preschool due to limited English ability, code-switched to provide more input in the societal language to balance her grandson's bilingualism. This investigation focuses on how a code-switching caregiver can support an emergent bilingual child's weaker language and how the child uses his entire linguistic repertoire to accommodate and communicate in response. Video-recordings, made weekly at the grandmother’s home when the child was between 2;9–4;11 of age, were used for quantitative analyses of language choice, andfor qualitative analyses of code-switching and discourse patterns. While increasinghis exposure to English, the grandmother used Cantonese to scaffold and negotiatemeaning with her grandson. The child was able to accommodate his grandmother’suse of English by using congruent lexicalization and convergence as part of hiscode-switching practices not seen in his grandmother’s data: (1) to convey information in ‘mixed’ complex/compound sentences that he could not produce in onelanguage alone, and (2) to form complete utterances in his weaker one by using themorphosyntactic rules of his stronger language. The fluidity and hybridity of theconversations between the child and his grandmother show how such translingualpractices can provide a linguistic bridge for emergent bilingualism.