• The Conference
  • Home
  • Programme
  • Venue & directions
  • Organizing Committee
  • Scientific Committee
  • Exhibitors & sponsors
  • Satellite events
  • Conference Party
• Past & future
  • Previous symposia
  • Finland 2014
  • Spain 2016
• About FU Berlin
  • University homepage
  • Humanities at FU

Programme: accepted abstracts

Search for abstracts --- authors title abstract

---

Abstract ID: 636

Part of General Poster Session (Other abstracts in this session)

Code-switching in Repair Sequences among First and Second Language Speakers of Japanese

Authors: MOMMA, MAHO
Submitted by: MOMMA, MAHO (Kanagawa University, Japan)

This paper examines code-switching in repair sequences in conversations among Japanese as first language speakers and second language speakers. In this paper, by using Conversation Analysis (CA) (e.g., Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson, 1974) as an analytical method, I will discuss in what environment code-switching occurs and what interactional work the participants achieve by carrying out code-switching.

Studies of code-switching (CS) have been investigated as a topic of major study for many years (e.g., Auer, 1984: 1995; Myers-Scotton, 1983). Most current CS studies can be divided into two types: studies that view CS as a ‘symbolic action,’ and those that consider CS as a ‘practical social action’. The former is based on identity-related studies (e.g., Gumperz, 1982; Myers-Scotton, 1993) while the latter apply conversation analytic perspective to describe the order of social actions (e.g., Auer, 1984; Wei, 1998; Gafaranga, 2000).This study takes this conversation analytic perspective and applies it to analyze CS occurred in an urban area in Japan.

The data for this study comes from approximately nine hours of video and audio-recorded interaction among first language speakers of Japanese and second language speakers of Japanese. Most of the interaction was recorded in Yokohama, Japan.

The analysis of the data identified three types of CS depending on environment and actions of CS; (a) CS due to recipients’problems in understanding; (b) CS due to speakers’ dissatisfaction with repair solution; and (c) CS due to combination of (a) and (b). In the instances of code-switching occurred in response to recipients’ problems of understanding, the intersubjectivity problems recipient had faced were solved by the speakers’ code-switching. As for the instances of code-switching due to speakers' dissatisfaction with candidate solutions to word searches, the speakers oriented to the problems of not finding appropriate words and code-switching was deployed to provide better candidate solutions to the search. In the instances of combination of the two types, the switches occurred as a result of both interactants’ problems of achieving intersubjectivity and interactants’ dissatisfaction with candidate repair solution.

Moreover, this study demonstrated the following two points. First, as this study examined CS instances in repair sequences, all the CS instances were problem-related. When the participants had some problems in talk, they tended to deal with the problems by code-switching. Secondly, it was demonstrated that CS was always recipient-designed. Although the speakers did not always switch to the recipients’ first language, they always switched to the language the recipients could recognize or understand.

Japan is often considered to be a monolingual country. However, in universities in urban cities in Japan, as the one the participants in this study are associated with, there are lots of teachers and students who come from different parts of the world, and the universities offer classes of various languages. Therefore, Japan being a monolingual country may be a myth, and it is actually a multilingual society, especially in urban areas.