Codeswitching practices from “other tongues” to the “mother tongue” in the provincial Philippine classroom

Publication date: February 2020Source: Linguistics and Education, Volume 55Author(s): Dana OsborneAbstractEveryday speakers of the minority language of Ilocano in the Philippines often hold many ideological projects in their minds simultaneously; these become particularly productive and apparent in the linguistically regimented space of the classroom. Here, students and teachers work together to mutually construct a distinct sense of ethnolinguistic identity through critical codeswitching practices from “other tongues” to the “mother tongue.” The central frame of doing school is primarily constructed linguistically through the use of the licensed codes of English and/or Filipino. The frame of the classroom space undergoes temporary transformation through the invocation of the keys of discipline and play, dialogically marked through the switch into the mother tongue of Ilocano. In the highly proscribed space of the classroom, salient possibilities for the bracketing of distinct ethnolinguistic identities are engendered by the discursive and structural effects brought about by codeswitching.
Source: Linguistics and Education - Category: Speech-Language Pathology Source Type: research