C-S in Conversation Forum

Celso Álvarez Cáccamo • Linguística Geral • Depto. de Galego-Português, Francês e Linguística • Faculdade de Filologia • Universidade da Corunha • 15071 Corunha • Galiza • Tel. +34 981 167000 ext. 1888 • Fax +34 981 167151 • lxalvarz@udc.es

From: Deborah Augsburger, augsburg@sas.upenn.edu Date: Tue, 17 Feb 1998 09:41:43 -0500 (EST) Subject: Call for AAA98 Panel on Kids & Code-switching Kate Riley and I have been talking about organizing a panel for AAA98 on kids & code-switching, and have come up with the following preliminary prospectus. Please forward to anyone you think would be interested. Thanks! ********************************** Call for AAA 98 Panel on Kids & Code-switching We are organizing a session for AAA 98 tentatively titled: "Kids & Code-switching: Constructing & Confounding Boundaries in Multilingual Populations." Though code-switching is a topic of perennial interest to linguists and linguistic anthropologists, the code-switching of children has only begun to receive the sort of attention it deserves. While there may be fruitful ways to revisit the old one-system vs. two-system bilingual acquisition debate, we are more interested in approaches that highlight issues of language ideology, identity politics and the interpolated social and linguistic consequences of kids' code-switching. We'll write a more precisely elaborated session proposal after we gather the abstracts, but, in brief and general terms, we are looking for papers that go in some of the following and related directions: 1) comparing and contrasting the code-switching of kids and adults in a given population, examining how these differences reflect and/or constitute ongoing transformations in the linguistic codes, translinguistic systems and social relations. 2) considering a) when, how and why members of a population assign linguistic elements to one "separate" code or another, b) how members of a population (as well as linguists) construct child code-switching as a salient phenomenon (or not) and whether this leads to anxiety about the kids' development and/or the fate of the language and culture, and c) how ideologies about mixing and purity affect socialization practices manifested as critiquing, challenging, correcting and/or modeling 3) exploring various theoretical approaches to the interpretation of mixed utterances (esp. the strategic indexing of social meanings, identities, shades of relationship (Blom & Gumperz, Gumperz, Myers-Scotton, Woolard), the dialogic incorporation of multiple "voices" (Bakhtin, Voloshinov, Hill, Spitulnik, etc.) and how this can be applied to kids' code-switching practices and the formation of personal and social identity. 4) focusing on the absence or avoidance of code-switching by kids in environments where the practice might be expected to occur (e.g. Kulick). We've kept the above fairly sketchy with a view to sparking your own thoughts on the topic rather than spelling out our own. We would love to receive your comments on the above, particularly how we might further refine (or broaden) the topic, and, of course, abstracts! Ideally we'd like to receive abstracts by February 25th, so we can apply for "Invited Session" status by the March 1 deadline. We look forward to hearing from you! Please forward to others who might be interested. Deb Augsburger augsburg@sas.upenn.edu Kate Riley kriley@together.net