Developing children’s language awareness: switching codes in the language classroom

Abstract

This article examines how learning an additional language can positively affect children’s opinions and feelings about languages and how this process can be enriched when different languages namely, the additional language and the children’s L1s are present and used in the classroom in an informed way. It is hypothesised that this will benefit children as language learners and, ultimately, as learners. A qualitative and quantitative study was carried out with 25 young learners for a school term. Their L1s (Catalan and Spanish) were brought into the English classroom and activities incorporating translation and codeswitching (CS), namely the pedagogically based CS, were developed. This switching of codes was promoted by the teacher but used by the students. Based on the research results, the article concludes by describing and discussing the positive develop ment observed in the children’s language awareness and plurilingual competence.