Indonesia’s education trend has been changing substantially in the last 15
years. National Plus and International schools whose medium of delivery is English
have mushroomed and the sight of Indonesian children speaking fluent English in
public places is no longer rare. The aim of this study is to assess the code-switching
conducted by the research participants in four occasions, namely: during lunch break
at school, during meal time at home, during family gathering at relative’s house and
after Catholic praying school at church. The research participants are three bilingual
siblings aged 17 year old, 14 year old and 10 year old. They were asked to record
their conversation with their interlocutors in the aforementioned domains. The
recording were then transcribed and analyzed to find out the research participant who
code-switched most frequently, in which domain code-switching happens most
intensively, the functions of code-switching and the matrix language of each research
participant. Analysis showed that the youngest research participant produced the most
code-switching. Two research participants code-switched the most in family domain
during meal time while the oldest one showed a very dynamic code-switching pattern
in social domain during school lunch break. All three research participants codeswitched
mostly to fill lexical gap in their speech. Finally, the matrix language of the
oldest and the youngest research participants is Indonesian while the matrix language
of the other one is English. Age of the bilingual children is proven to be influential in
the frequency of code-switching. In this case, code-switching is useful in
smoothening the communication of the bilinguals. |