DISTRIBUTIONAL ANALYSIS OF CODE-SWITCHING IN ACADEMIC ENVIRONMENTS BY FEMALE UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Ghada Al-Ghathami
Dr., Imam University, Saudi Arabia, gghathami@yahoo.com

Abstract

In modern academic environments, complex systems of interaction among people are more observable. Academic situations are institutional domains that require a prescribed form of talking, characterized by its professionalism and formal selection of codes. In educational environments, especially universities, students tend to change their code choice alternating between varieties according to the topic of discussion. Subject-related topics in conversations of college students are usually featured by high frequencies of code switched lexical items as opposed to personal topics. This paper attempts to investigate the linguistic behavior and code choice of university female students in Saudi Arabia, discussing the features of code choice and code switch across a vast variety of topics in their conversations. The data of the study is a collection of recorded conversations for female Saudi university students with a total duration of 130 minutes of uncontrolled topic flow. Twenty-eight participants took part in this study. The direct observation method and the substitute observer method were followed to obtain natural data. It has been concluded that academic and technical topics are featured by a high number of code switches between English and Arabic on the intra-sentential level, whereas personal topics, as well as gossiping, scored the least amount of code switches between English and Arabic. Code choice of the lexical level also varied from one topic to another. It is recommended that further investigation is carried out on a wider sample, including both male and female participants. Other domains of interaction need to be addressed, including formal and informal settings.

Keywords: Code choice, code switch, conversation analysis, inter-sentential switching, intra-sentential switching, linguistic forms, topic