Abstract
Codeswitching, use of two languages in one speech event, is a natural phenomenon in
multilingual and bilingual societies. This practice is common in Pakistani society as well
– people speak in two or more than two languages in service encounters, social
encounters, in radio programmes, on television talk shows. All the people with
competence in two or three languages make use of these languages whenever and
wherever they interact with other people. The same bilingual practices are carried over
to educational settings despite the fact that most educational institutions (at primary,
secondary and especially at the tertiary level) do not encourage codeswitching in
classrooms. In fact, this practice is prohibited in a large number of educational
institutions. It has been observed that due to the students’ lack of communicative
competence in, teachers sometimes resort to the use the mainstream language to
facilitate learning in some classrooms. That is the reason that codeswitching between
English and Urdu (or any other language) takes place in nearly all classrooms in
Pakistan. For example, it has been observed and recorded at certain universities that
teachers and students both ‘construct knowledge’ in Urdu and English. This paper
describes and analyses a few patterns of codeswitching in such classrooms and tries to
explore some possible reasons and outcomes this sociolinguistic phenomenon.
Kaleem Raza Khan. (2014) SOCIO-LINGUISTIC ANALYSIS OF CODE-SWITCHING IN CLASSROOMS DISCOURSE, Journal of Social Science and Humanities, Volume 53, Issue 1.
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