Symposia & Conferences
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Item Code Switching and Code Mixing in an ESL Class: A Study of Undergraduates in a State University.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Samarakoon, S. M. S. S.Code switching and code mixing exist in bilingual societies where people use two or more languages to communicate. Being able to speak more than one language, bilinguals can code-switch and mix as means of effectively conveying meaning. Code switching and mixing frequently occur in English classrooms in faculties of Arts in Sri Lankan universities, where the teachers use Sinhala or L1 to teach English as a second language. The effectiveness of using and mixing L1 and L2 has been debated over the years. Therefore, this paper aims to investigate when and why teachers in this context use code mixing and code switching. Two classroom observations were carried out, two language instructors were interviewed and 30 ESL students in an intermediate level group were given a questionnaire to gather data for the study. The students' views on the use of L1 were assessed using a questionnaire that contained five-point Likert scale items. The results showed that the informant teachers generally tried to code-switch as little as possible but that they did code-switch in some of those situations where the students preferred either a combination of Sinhala and English or only Sinhala. During instances where the students cannot understand the lessons when instructions or explanations are given only in English, the informant teachers switch to L1, to create a less intimidating atmosphere which was one of the observations of the study. All 30 students strongly agreed with the fact that L1 should be used to understand grammar rules and lexical areas. The informant teachers agree to some extent with the idea that learners will understand more if they were to uses the L1 language of the learners to explain certain grammatical components. Both the informant teachers agree to some extent that learners will understand more, if she uses the L1 languages to explain the meanings of certain lexical item.Item Code Mixing as a Ruled Governed Phenomenon– A Study with Special Reference to the Tamil-English Mixed Discourse.(The Third International Conference on Linguistics in Sri Lanka, ICLSL 2017. Department of Linguistics, University of Kelaniya, Sri Lanka., 2017) Sanmuganathan, K.; Wijerathne, W.M.In bilingual and multilingual societies, there are usually at least two interacting language groups, each representing different cultural and linguistic features. Sri Lanka is a multilingual country where there is a tendency of mixing two languages as a communicative strategy used by the speakers. It has been observed that mixing of indigenous languages - Sinhala, Tamil and English is a common speech behaviour, which occurs in the discourse of educated bilinguals in Sri Lanka. There have been several studies on sociolinguistic, structural linguistic and psycholinguistic aspects of code mixing in different countries. In recent years, researchers have increasingly focused on the linguistic constraints on code mixing. The objective of this study is to investigate the rules of code-mixing (CM) in Tamil-English mixed language data. The focus of the present study of Tamil-English mixed discourse is the educated urban bilinguals in Jaffna. From a syntactic point of view, it is proposed that code mixing is governed by a host code/guest code principle. This principle says that in a code-mixed discourse involving languages L1 and L2, where L1 is the host code and L2 is the guest code, the morphosyntactic rules of L2 must conform to the morphosyntactic rules of L1, the language of the discourse. In order to determine the rules that govern Tamil-English CM, the qualitative method of analysis was adopted. The present study drew upon data collected a recorded spontaneous conversation between bilinguals in a language contact situation in which the two languages are syntactically very different from each other, namely, Tamil and English. The data collected were analyzed and findings were derived. Linguistically, the analysis confirms that Tamil-English Code-mixing is a rule-governed behaviour. The study addresses that Tamil English code mixing is a rule governed phenomenon, that is, there are constraints that govern where in a sentence a code-mix can occur and where it cannot occur. In that context, CM facilitates to avoid communicative hindrances.