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Social and situational factors affecting the communicative strategy of dialect code-switching

Studying the communicative competence of native speakers is a vast undertaking which involves examining the form and content of spoken discourse (e.g., the structure and message of speech acts and speech events) and relating them to a situational context (e.g., physical/temporal setting, psychological/ cultural scene and active/passive participants, as in Hymes, 1974). Understanding the communicative competence of second-language learners is even more complicated because it involves additional factors. With all speakers we must distinguish between performance errors and variable rules; but with nonnative learners, we have the additional problems of: (1) establishing what has been 'acquired'; (2) accounting for higher levels of performance error; (3) distinguishing fossilized errors from not yet fully learned target structures (a problem in cross-sectional studies); and (4) understanding the role of communicative strategies. This paper presents evidence that dialect code-switching is a consistent and statistically significant communicative strategy used among bilingual children in their second language and that it is therefore a part of their communicative competence. The paper does not attempt to measure communicative competence as a whole or to survey the communicative strategies employed but is rather a discussion of just one strategy (dialect code-switching), in one aspect of language use (pronunciation of vowels), by one group (Chinese-Thai bilingual fourth-grade children), in one type of situational context (an interview). The context was controlled as much as possible for topic, time, place and social characteristics of the listener such as age and socioeconomic status. The major variable examined here for its relation to dialect code-switching is the ethnic identity of the listener.