No abstract

This introduction to the International Journal of Bilingualism special issue on “Codeswitching in West Africa” is divided into three parts. The first part presents an overview of West Africa, with particular attention paid to the linguistic diversity and multilingualism that characterize the region. Multilingualism in the region obtains at both the societal and the individual level: as Dakubu ((1997). Korle meets the sea: A sociolinguistic history of Accra. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press) observes, polyglotism is a longstanding characteristic of West African cities. Within this context, intense intrasentential codeswitching is widespread. A taxonomy is presented, with languages characterized as colonial, majority, or minority, and general patterns set forth as to the most common types of codeswitching dyad. The second part of the introduction provides an overview of the research that has been carried out on codeswitching in the region. Special attention is given to the earliest works. Works are divided according to whether their focus was sociolinguistic or structural, but it is to be noted that authors frequently paid crucial attention to both. Finally, in the third part, the introduction presents the five articles that make up the special issue.

<p><em>This work assesses the effects of</em><em> </em><em>family background of second language learners on their academic writing competence in English. A cursory</em><em> </em><em>study of some examination scripts of first-year students reveals some poor writing skills of students in areas such as concord, spelling, capitalization, and fragmentation errors.30 participants were selected from a class of 121 students</em><em> </em><em>from the Ghana Baptist University College, a private</em><em> </em><em>institution in Kumasi, Ghana. Initially, the class of 121 was sorted out into three groups—those who said they used only English at home, those who said they used only Ghanaian language(s) at home, and those who said they used both English and Ghanaian language(s) at home. Each group was further divided along gender lines and 5 students from each of the 6 sub-groups were picked randomly. The participants</em><em> </em><em>were then made to write a sit-in assessment on a topic and were graded by an independent assessor. The findings of the study reveal that the performance of the bilingual English and</em><em> </em><em>Ghanaian language learners outweighed those of their contemporaries. The study also revealed a positive correlation between attitudes of parents about English and learners’ academic writing skills. These have pedagogical and theoretical implications for the teaching and learning of English as a second language in Ghana. Language proficiency involves the development of skills in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. All these four aspects of language development are equally vital in the language learning process, but the current paper focuses on the development of writing skills by second language learners of English in Ghana.</em></p><p><em><br /></em><em></em></p>

The basic characteristic of composite codeswitching is that the languages involved share responsibility for framing bilingual constituents. This paper points to evidence of this characteristic in the nature of morpheme distribution in mixed possessive constructions in Ewe–English codeswitching, spoken in Ghana. An Ewe semantic distinction between two types of possessive constructions is consistently neutralized when English possessum nominals are used instead of their Ewe counterparts, and the paper demonstrates that the neutralization of this distinction results from direct mapping of English-origin grammatical information about English nominals onto Ewe grammar. It explains that this mapping of information from one grammar onto another one is characteristic of composite codeswitching and that it is facilitated by the fact that language production is modular in the sense of Levelt ((1989). Speaking: From intention to articulation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) and Myers-Scotton ((1993). Duelling languages: Grammatical structure in codeswitching. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press; (2002). Contact linguistics: Bilingual encounters and grammatical outcomes. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press).

This paper highlights the situation in Ghana (and most likely also in Cameroon) where English is learned and used as a second (and official)