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

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.