Naila Husnaini

1710732033
Sociolinguistic

Information Code-Switching: A Study of Language Preferences in Academic Libraries

Article Review

The article is compiled by Frans Albarillo from United States, it consist of twenty-nine
pages with the main focus is to the study of Student who born outside United State or
foreign-born students language preference and information use in academic libraries. This
study is examined by linguistics concept called code-switching which is a phenomenon
where the speakers change between two or more languages or between varieties of a
language within a speech action or discourse. The article has the main finding that the
student’s culture and language represent an influence on part of their identity, information
consumption, and academic socialization. The basic research question the author investigates
is whether there are types of information activities and places where multilingual students
code-switch. Later the finding of this research will relate to the practical implication in the
case of academic libraries in the United States, the status of non-English languages and their
presence in library collections, signage, and user experiences are rarely discussed, and, in
most cases, languages other than English are invisible.

The article consists of twelve part which are abstract, introduction, literature review,
explanation about the use of language in libraries, methodology, survey data and analysis
which contains the data of the research, result, focus group data analysis, discussion,
limitation, implications for academic library service, conclusion and the last is notes. The
article is arranging well therefore it easy to understand what the author intended in his article.

In part Literature Review the author explained many related study and concepts that
support his research such as the important concept of the notion of a language domain, and
also the different term of information and cod-switching, also alludes to filed language
teaching method. The author also has many detail information about the related study. in part
Language in Libraries the author also explained how important this research since the topic is
can only associated with population like international students and immigrants. It also
because there is a critical gap that no one has looked how librarians need to vary their
instruction according to the different library population such as: international students,
immigrant students, generation 1.5 students and foreign language learners.

The author conducted focus group interviews in the spring of 2014 and survey in the fall
of 2014. In this article the author also include his difficulties when recruiting for the group
focus since the group focus were very small ranging from 2 to 4 individuals per group. The
author explains the brief detailed about how he conduct the data collection procedures such
as using a zoom H2 audio recorder and transcribed the recordings in NVivo. In this research
92 people complete surveys were analyzed and the response rate was 74 percent.

The author uses the grouping variable for language domain and information tasks show in
matrix in figuer1 and 2. And the answer were is created on a five point-type scale (1=not at
all. And 5 = very well). The author also make the focus group demogrhafics based on
Gender, Age, and Length of time in US. Next, in the Figure 3, the author created variable for
language preference for academic and nonacademic reading to determine whether students
who are more likely to code-switch prefer a particular language for academic and leisure
reading.
In table 2 the author than found that foreign-born students are very likely to switch to L2
(the non-English language) for information tasks and in linguistic domains such as home,
school, and with friends. And then in table 3 it shows associations between language ability
and CS using Somers’ d test. And then next in focus group data there were 10 instances of
students reporting code-switching in the focus group transcripts.
The data from this study is provide evidence that language influences the information
behavior of students in the form of code-switching and dialect switching. This kind of
research would allow librarians to map language use, language choice, and language
preferences of students to actual library collections, services, and resources.
After all this article is a hard but worth it research to read because the finding of the
article is unique. In my opinion the only weakness of this article is because the author not
explains clearly where the research took place at first and it only appears in the middle of the
analysis data which make the reader confuse where actually this research conduct and what is
the meaning of foreign for the author.

Work Cited

Albarillo Frans. “Information Code-Switching: A Study of Language Preferences in

Academic Libraries” Colllege & Research Libararies. Vol79, No 5, 2018, pp 1-29.
Access in March 28, 2020.