Investigating Arabic-English Code-switchingby AlgerianBilinguals

Abstract

Code-switching is studied mainly in connection with bilingualism as a communicative strategy where bilingual speakers tend to switch code-switching the same sentence or clause. This study aims at disclosing the reasons that drive students to code-switch two languages; mainly Arabic and English, and to seek out whether they are employing it in their daily speech consciously or randomly.It also aims at investigating in which contexts they codeswitch them exactly. The present research attempts to shed light on the case of alternating between two languages, or as referred to code-switching in relation to the ability of speaking two languages.Moreover, the investigation sets focus on discovering whether code-switching transmits the meanings.So, in order to investigate this phenomenon, the methodology comprises both qualitative and quantitative methods to describe and analyze data collected through two research tools, a questionnaire and a week-live observation.A sample of the population of English students is chosen to be tested and it consists of thirty students from different levels randomly selected.Therefore, the analyses of the results of the data reveal that thereare different reasons that compel bilingual individuals to code- switch. Besides, they use code-switching consciously whenever they are dealing with classroom matters, thus, they predict which code they will employ. By contrast, they often tend to code-switch unconsciously because of familiarity with these English and Arabic. Moreover, they codeswitch in several topics and in various contexts and it has been proven beneficial and purposive because of transmitting the meaning they intend.