Week 15: Codeswitching and interactional sociolinguistics

In her chapter, Mckay talks about ways in which interactional sociolinguistics influences english as a lengua franca interactions, codeswitching of bilingual users, and their attitudes toward codeswitching. Context is critical to the interpretation of meaning.  We need to consider the student's background when we teach. In the example from the book, the teacher believes the African American student who answers "i dont know" doesnt want to answer or doesnt know the answer, but in the African American community is understood to mean "I need some encouragement". This example was interesting because teacher could be making assumptions based on past experiences without considering the student's background. We also need to consider student's attitudes toward codeswitching. Codeswitching "is the alternation of linguistic codes in the same conversation" by bilingual speakers. It is interesting to see that in Singapore codeswitching is a dominant feature of speech. Speakers in Singapore are considered "English-knowing" bilinguals because English is the medium of instruction. Overall, Mckay's chapter examines research on ELF, codeswitching, and language attitudes in which interactional sociolinguistics has provided valuable information on EIL interactions.

We rarely consider the fact that native speakers of English actually do have different accents. Lippie-Green's chapter on English with accents. An accent is distinguished with a stress in words or even sentences. It is a specific way of speaking. I like this article, because it definitely relates to the movie "American tongues". I enjoyed watching that movie. I find it interesting to see that not only do L2 speakers of English have different intonations because of their native language, but native speakers also have different accents and intonations that sets them apart based on their geographical area. People only use standard English in certain contexts, such as in jobs.  They mention that all spoken language is variable to convey social, stylistic and greographic meaning. They also talk about sound houses. Sound houses is a new term that I had never heard before. It is an evolving product of our minds, the home of the language or accent. It is built by the people that surrounds us at the beginning, but then it is changed/rebuilt to construct our own's phonology. These readings have been interesting because they discuss accents, codeswitching and sociolinguistic interactions.