ABSTRACT
Research on codeswitching and bilingual first language acquisition has focused primarily on whether young children’s codeswitching reflects adult-like intuition about the underlying grammar of codeswitching, or the subconscious rules which govern language mixing. A central concern in bilingual and dual-language education has been language distribution in teaching and learning activities. R. Jacobson believed that by codeswitching in the classroom students would acquire subject-appropriate vocabulary in both languages, with none of the practical problems of language separation approaches. Children who hear mixed language input as primary linguistic data will therefore be subconsciously aware of whether Tense is of the “French type” or the “English type” through its association with a language-particular phonology, permitting acquisition to proceed as in the monolingual case. Coding was done by native speakers, and each coded transcript was proofed by at least one other native speaker trained in the coding system.
