BILINGUAL LANGUAGE PRACTICES IN A KOREAN INTERNATIONAL SCHOOL: RULES, CODE-SWITCHING, AND LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES

Abstract

This ethnographic study explores Korean students bilingual language practices and language ideologies in a Korean international school. Under the neoliberal logic of human development, English, as one of the most dominant world languages, comes to be an essential linguistic resource in the educational discourses in Korea. In an attempt to disclose how Korean locals embrace the rapid stream of globalization, I examine a Korean international school, the local center of English education, where interaction-focused regimes grant Korean students' entrance to the world. I describe diverse social-contextual settings of the school in relation to multiple communicative norms imposed by the school and the teachers. In this English-immersed school, English holds an official status as the language of instruction, whereas Korean is limitedly allowed to use only in informal domains. Therefore, local students construct their own sociolinguistic rules to choose each language in consideration of various social-contextual factors and relative degree of formality in three different school settings: regular classes, Korean classes, and recess. I analyze the social-contextual factors in students' sociolinguistic rules in each setting through a predictive model of language choice. I further delve into students' interactional practices in terms of intra- and inter-sentential code-switching. I distinguish the practices of code-switching in two ways by looking into the markedness in the acts of switching. I analyze patterns and topics of code-switching as unmarked acts while acknowledging the utilization of implicated social and pragmatic meanings in students' practice of code-switching as marked acts. By exploring unmarked code-switching, I disclose most generally observed patterns and topics of code-switching that often occur without situational shifts, changing an addressee, or implicated meanings. On the contrary, by examining marked code-switching, I discover various pragmatic and social meanings articulated in the very act of switching from one linguistic resource to another. Lastly, I examine multiple ideologies of English in the school to discuss how students - as autonomous social agents - understand and explain their bilingual language practices. Teachers and parents stress the necessity and legitimacy of the interactional use of English under ideologies on the basis of double monolingualism, in turn, lead to a subordination of Korean in the school. Although students actively engage in mixed language use and utilize interactional meanings through code-switching to establish and articulate social relations and for efficient and creative communication at the level of interactional practices, they adopt and reformulate the adults' language ideologies at the level of discourses. Such ambivalent attitudes in their own communicative practices are understood as ongoing contestation and negotiations between two situational identities: a solidarity-based local identity as Korean versus an English-mediated prestigious social identity. In other words, students' fluctuation between each identity is their situational strategies to deploy favorable identity in varying situations. It is, in turn, the dynamics of local agency in the local embracement of globalization.