Teachers’ Code-Switching in a Content-Focused English as a Second Language (ESL) Classroom: Patterns and Functions

Abstract

As Pakistan is a multilingual country where educational institutions are inevitably bilingual and cannot sustain freeing themselves from the influence of bilinguality, both the teachers and the students have to switch from English to Urdu or Urdu to English during the learning process as both belong to bilingual or multilingual backgrounds. Keeping in view these issues, the present research has aimed to investigate those factors which aid to create bilingual or multilingual English as a Second Language classroom. These factors along with other issues have been analyzed on the hypotheses of students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards code switching, functions and patterns of switching and finally, and the effect of code switching in the classroom. The research is a mixed kind of research based on both quantitative and qualitative analyses in which relation between the use of code switching with learning success has been explored. The results of the study show that code switching does play an important role in English as a Second Language classroom. Both the participants, teachers and students, do not want to eliminate this strategy and favour it as a supportive tool in learning English.