A Study of L2 Speakers' Mental Dialogue: Focusing on Language Alternation

In Vygotsky's sociocultural theory, this study shows how language alternation in private speech was used by L2 speakers as a mediational tool in their solitary exam preparation activity. In order to investigate the details of language alternation in private speech, both oral and written forms of private speech in their L1 (Korean) and L2 (English) were closely examined. The main function of private speech was self-regulation. Two types of language alternation were observed in the data: One is mixing two languages within a sentence or a clause in a form of oral translation, which is inserting English biological terms within a Korean clausal structure. The other is reading Korean meanings from English-Korean dictionary. This use of language alternation shows the locality in its characteristics depending on the participant's cognitive process, noticing the ways how L1 and L2 occurs in interpersonal interaction as mediational tools in the cognitive process.