Effects of Teachers’ Code-switching in Tertiary Level English Medium Classroom on Students’ proficiency in Speaking English: Case Study of A Cumilla-Based Private University

Abstract

Officially Bangladesh is a monolingual country. But because of the influence of the former British colonial language and the global linguistic imperialism, English language becomes an important index in many official spheres of Bangladesh. The tertiary level education sector, specially the private universities incorporate English as their medium of instruction (EMI). Moreover, in the case of the Departments of English, by default English becomes their medium of instruction. So, the teachers and students of English department become bilingual, having competency in both Bengali and English. This bilingualism creates code-switching opportunities for them in English language classrooms. Both the teachers and students switch codes for several reasons, like- for teachers, to make themselves understood easily, for students, to cover their weakness in English vocabulary, etc. There are both pros and cons of code-switching or translanguaging in EFL classrooms. On the one hand, it is believed that code-switching helps the learners to understand and acquire the second language (English) easily. On the other hand, it is also believed that code-switching creates an obstacle in the second language (English) acquisition process. I selected this topic to do my research because this issue is very practical and a very limited amount of research is done in this regard. However, in this current study the broad scenario will be narrowed down. As most of the time teachers play the authoritative role in the classroom, so, this study will be focused on only the teachers’ code-switching in EFL classroom and its effects on only students’ spoken fluency in English as their reading and writing skills are covered and concerned by the education system. Qualitative approach will be incorporated to analyze and discuss why the teachers often switch their codes to deliver lectures and how it affects students’ acquisition of English speaking proficiency. The research will be based on a private university, located in Cumilla, a southeastern district of Bangladesh.