Abstract

This study examines the second-generation Turkish-American children’s speech characteristics in terms of discourse and pragmatic abilities in Turkish. The naturally-occurring data were collected ethnographically in a Turkish community-based school in the United States via audio and video-recorded participant observations of children at different age and proficiency levels in Turkish. Two main data sources were a semi-structured interview and audio recordings of the participant students in the school environment. All the recorded data were transcribed and analyzed by the researchers by using discourse analysis methods. The data yielded the participant children’s pragmalinguistic skills as follows: metalinguistic comments, translanguaging, translanguaging as effect of input, discourse and pragmatics. Major findings were the following: 1) There were no instances of metalinguistic comments in the natural recordings, whereas there were some occurrences in the interview. In accordance with their age and proficiency levels, the children made metalinguistics comments on the awareness of their bilingualism and biculturalism, their similarities and differences between their friends in the mainland, awareness of their translanguaging practices, and their fluid and hybrid identities, 2) All of the speech data included translanguaging, but there were more instances of it in the interviews than in the recordings. This finding may suggest that the students may have felt difficulty expressing themselves in Turkish, the language of the interviews, and needed to convey meaning via using their full linguistic repertoire. It may also be explained by that the children created their own translanguaging space to make themselves as clear to the interviewer as possible. 3) Discourse and pragmatics data included the categories of connectives “ve” and “ve de,” ([and]) gap fillers, alerters, and requests, which showed variety in use. Analyses of discourse data also revealed that language proficiency and language choice went hand in hand for the second-generation Turkish American children. They were English dominant, and translanguaged mostly when a first- generation Turkish American adult was in the picture. The study aims to contribute to the descriptive literature on the pragmalinguistic characteristics of young bilinguals.