Abstract:
This paper focuses on the different reasons students code-switch, how they code-switch, why,
where and when they code-switch. It attempts to show how much students have been codeswitching
nowadays. This paper also attempts to describe the reasons young children codeswitch
in the classroom with one another. The two instruments used in order to explore the issue
of code-switching in the Early Years classrooms were participant observation, where observation
of students were made in different classes and documentation of their dialogue was recorded, and
teacher interviews, where interviews were conducted with five teachers in the Early Years
department. The results showed that children tended to code-switch in order to negotiate the
language for their interaction and to adapt to other students’ favoured language and their
capability in addition to manage conversational talk. The results also showed that codeswitching
is employed as a supplementary resource to attain certain conversational objectives in
interactions with other bilingual speakers. Research should be conducted on the on the
presentation of the literature on mixing in bilingual children during the earliest of language
acquisition. More research should also be done on students’ code-switching and the reasons they
code-switch should be made.
