Codeswitching: Linguistic and literacy understanding of teaching dilemmas in multilingual classrooms

• Teacher behaviors surrounding CS are strategic in execution and often regretted on reflection.
• CS was already consistently understood from a deficit orientation, and that its use was seen as an example of imperfect bilingualism with CS understood as a miscue.
• CS is seen in content classrooms as a mediation strategy that assists in students’ learning of content.
• The concept of home language medium of instruction for African learners (in South Africa) has been fatally tainted by its association with apartheid education policies.
• In a classroom context, CS is a viable solution to problems and potentials that arise between contact languages. CS is a braiding strategy for these languages that make contact in the classroom.

This paper offers a linguistic background on what codeswitching (CS) is, as well as comparative models of accounting for it. The linguistic and sociolinguistic accounts are followed by a synthesis of the existing research on educational uses of CS, in both foreign language (FL), second language learning, and multilingual content area classrooms. Finally, the paper offers a recommendation based on the research synthesis and anchored in observational data from South African classrooms in the Western Cape region. The recommendation calls for careful adoption of linguistic ecology in classrooms.