CODE-SWITCHING AND CODE-MIXING AMONG UNIVERSITY LECTURERS IN FORMAL INTERACTIONS WITH STUDENTS

Abstract

The main purpose of this study is to contribute to a better understanding of the phenomenon of code-switching that occurs in lecturer-student interactions. Using Saville-Troike (1986) and Hoffman (1991) models, the study explores the linguistic features of code-switching, that include intra-sentential code-switching, inter-sentential code-switching and code-switching at word, phrase and clause levels, which are examined in both male and female university teachers’ lectures. With a sample of nine lecturers and two undergraduate classes of about sixty students each, a corpus ofrecorded Akan/English code-switching from lecturer-student interactions collected from the Department of English at the University of Education, Winneba, is presented and analysed. Findings reveal that lecturers who speak Akan as their L1 frequently code-switch more than the non-Akan speakers. The study also shows that intra-sentential code-switching is used dominantly by lecturers during their interactions with students at lectures followed by code-switching at the word level. The study concludes that code-switching can occur in formal contexts like the interaction among lecturers and students at lectures; however, whenever lecturers switched code to Akan, the non-Akan speakers become worried because intelligibility is greatly hampered.