Students’ Implicit Attitudes towards Teachers’ Classroom Codeswitching between English and Kurdish

Abstract

In the recent years, a large number of universities and institutes across Kurdistan region of Iraq adopted English as a medium of instruction. Since classroom is a language contact instance, codeswitching between English and Kurdish is highly likely to occur. One aspect of this phenomenon, the attitudes students have of teachers who codeswitch between English and Kurdish in the classroom has not been addressed to the best of the author’s knowledge. In this study, this issue is addressed and implicit attitudes towards teachers who codeswitch in the classroom are expressed. This sheds light on the phenomenon of classroom codeswitching between English and Kurdish. Forty-two participants studying at the department of English at a private technical institute in Duhok took part in a matched guise test to determine the implicit attitudes. After data collection, a repeated T-test was conducted to determine the results. The results indicate that in terms of teacher’s codeswitching or not codeswitching in classroom, there are no significant differences. In other words, the phenomenon of codeswitching between English and Kurdish in the classroom, for the study’s participants, is not an important matter and therefore more data is required to study this area more extensively.