Code-switching used by year 3 primary school teachers during English oracy lessons

Abstract

In Malta, children start learning the English language from the first year of primary school; however, the success of this depends on the experiences that children encounter in the classroom. Thus, this study is aimed to delve deeper into codeswitching, an aspect which is present in classrooms and which might affect the experience children have in the classroom as regards the learning of the English language. Interviews and observations were carried out with two Year 3 teachers in order to gain a deeper insight on teachers' views about code-switching as well as to observe why teachers code-switch during English oracy lessons. Although in their interviews, both teachers explained that they believe it is important that children are exposed to a good standard of English, they both switched to Maltese regularly during the lessons observed. Results show that throughout the observations there were seven reasons which explain why teachers decided to code-switch. It is also interesting to note that both teachers expressed that they think that code-switching is beneficial if it is helping the children to reach the lessons' objectives. Through this study, language patterns as regarding code-switching were observed.