Building Educational Technologies for Code-Switching: Current Practices, Difficulties and Future Directions

Abstract

Code-switching (CSW) is the phenomenon where speakers use two or more languages in a single discourse or utterance—an increasingly recognised natural product of multilingualism in many settings. In language teaching and learning in particular, code-switching has been shown to bring in many pedagogical benefits, including accelerating students’ confidence, increasing their access to content, as well as improving their participation and engagement. Unfortunately, however, current educational technologies are not yet able to keep up with this ‘multilingual turn’ in education. and are partly responsible for the constraint of this practice to only classroom contexts. In an effort to make progress in this area, we offer a data-driven position paper discussing the current state of affairs, difficulties of the existing educational natural language processing (NLP) tools for CSW and possible directions for future work. We specifically focus on two cases of feedback and assessment technologies, demonstrating how the current state of the art in these domains fails with code-switching data due to a lack of appropriate training data, lack of robust evaluation benchmarks and lack of end-to-end user-facing educational applications. We present some empirical user cases of how CSW manifests and suggest possible technological solutions for each of these scenarios.

Worldwide Trend Analysis of Psycholinguistic Research on Code Switching Using Bibliometrix R-tool

“…From a broader perspective of research trends, certain topics have been increasingly attracting attention from researchers exploring code switching in recent decades. Among these topics, grammatical gender (Balam et al, 2023; Pierantozzi & Cocchi, 2022), bilingual language production (Chen et al, 2023; Zang et al, 2022), and plurilingualism (Marshall, 2022; Nguyen et al, 2022) have emerged as focal points. These trends indicate a growing interest in exploring the intricacies of code switching in relation to linguistic features, bilingual language processing, and the use of multiple languages in diverse sociolinguistic settings.…”

The Teacher-Student Chatroom Corpus version 2: more lessons, new annotation, automatic detection of sequence shifts

“…Filighera et al (2022) focus on improved feedback systems for language learners, giving short answer feedback to explain scores for German and English exercises. Nguyen et al (2022) give an assessment of the state-of-the-art for educational technologies and how well they handle code-switching, pointing to future directions and opportunities for research. In this second version of the TSCC, the turns which feature words from languages other than English are labelled as 'non-English' sequences.…”

Exploring Code-Switching Practices in Vietnamese Classrooms: An Introductory Investigation

“…In the EFL classroom, code-switching-the alternation between languages or language varieties-serves various functions that influence language learning and classroom dynamics. Teachers can use code-switching to clarify instructions, explain complex concepts, or provide translations, particularly when learners encounter difficulties in understanding the target language (Nguyen, Yuan & Seed, 2022;Novianti & Said, 2021). This function aids in scaffolding comprehension and ensures learners grasp key concepts effectively (Köylü, 2020;May & Aziz, 2020).…”