Against the backdrop of the language classroom as a bilingual community of practice, this paper focuses on learners' use of discourse markers in one advanced German language classroom. As in other bilingual communities, the learners in the data exhibit phenomena that are characteristic for various stages along the continuum from codeswitching to mixed code (Auer, 1998). In analyzing the data for functional distribution of pairs of German and English discourse markers as used by the students, we find that the discourse markers `so' and `also' have specialized functionally on the level of the entire classroom community of practice, causing a structural division of labor between the two markers, and thus exhibiting evidence of a later stage of a mixed code. Our focus is primarily on the ways in which these practices are meaningful to the community rather than on how practices may originate from contact phenomena such as language transfer. We also draw attention to the importance of working across the fields of second language acquisition and bilingualism, since language learners in a classroom where the use of more than one language is allowed may develop similar practices to those found in natural bilingual settings.
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