Code Switching of English in Pakistani Urdu Classrooms

Bilingual Practices and Challenges

Abstract

One of the dimensions of spread of English in Pakistan is through its code-switching, code mixing and borrowing in the national and local/regional languages of Pakistan. These bilingual practices have very significant socio-linguistic implications in education. The present paper explores bilingual practices in the Urdu classrooms at primary level, their advantages or/ and challenges in Pakistani context. Five sections of grade 4 are selected as the sample of the current study. Classroom observation, interviews of teachers, role-play and group interviews of sample groups of students from an Army Public school of Rawalpindi are used as research tools to explore what are the bilingual practices of teachers and students in the classroom; how teachers and students use their linguistic repertoire to carry out classroom interaction; and how teachers and students perceive these bilingual practices. Observation notes- data and audio-video recorded data is categorized into two main categories:  Category A: Bilingual Practices of Teachers, Category B. Bilingual Practices of Students. Each category is further subcategorized into Standard/ Regular Bilingual Practices, and Non-standard/ Eccentric Bilingual Practices. The categorized data is analyzed to examine the bilingual practices of teachers and students used to perform various communicative, pragmatic, religio-social and management functions in the classroom. The study provides interesting insights into the phenomena; and it is expected that it will help in understanding the bilingual classroom dynamics in a better way.