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Multilinguality, Multimodality, and Multicompetence: Code‐ and Modeswitching by Minority Ethnic Children in Complementary Schools
Author(s) -
WEI LI
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
the modern language journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.486
H-Index - 83
eISSN - 1540-4781
pISSN - 0026-7902
DOI - 10.1111/j.1540-4781.2011.01209.x
Subject(s) - multimodality , multilingualism , ethnic group , creativity , perspective (graphical) , code switching , code (set theory) , sociology , ethnography , linguistics , pedagogy , psychology , anthropology , computer science , social psychology , philosophy , set (abstract data type) , artificial intelligence , programming language
This article examines the multilingual and multimodal practices of British Chinese children in complementary school classes from a multicompetence perspective. Using classroom interaction data from a number of Chinese complementary schools in 3 different cities in England, the article argues that the multicompetence perspective enables a holistic look at codeswitching and modeswitching by multilingual children of minority ethnic background and helps to highlight creativity and criticality—2 important and closely related concepts that have hitherto been underexplored in multilingualism research.