Students Learning to Code-Switch

This chapter begins by discussing the research that describes students learning to code-switch. It discusses two key environmental variables extrinsic to the student, which can influence a student's shifting from African American English (AAE) to Standard American English (SAE). These are the type of discourse in which the student is engaged, and the dialect spoken by and race of the conversational partner. Many African American students learn to code-switch early in their enrollment in formal education without direct explicit instruction, as part of the socialization processes involved in adapting to the education community's standards and expectations for the classroom. Part of learning to code-switch involves students acquiring pragmatic language sensitivity to context differences so they can adjust their linguistic forms when expected to do so. The amount of AAE feature production characterizing a student's discourse relates in important ways to his/her literacy skills.