Korean Students' Code-Switching in Their Communications

Abstract

The Linguistic Association of Korea Journal. 12 (2), 247-264. Code-switching can be found all over the world where bilingual speakers talk to each other in the form of words, phrases and clauses. This study aims to determine whether these uses present different levels of difficulty for ESL students and how they are used at the same time. The instrument consisted of the reading passages including 381 words. The participants (21 low-, 21 intermediate-, and 21 advanced-level ESL students from Korea) were instructed to read the passages and talk about the story in Korean. Statistical analyses of the participants' performances indicate the following: (a) The total use of code-switching increased as the participants' English proficiency level increased, which suggests that Korean students' use of code-switching follows a natural order-that is, words switching most frequently, phrases switching second and clauses switching last; (b) Length of stay in the U.S. does not affect code-switching use in the same order as proficiency levels; (c) the female speakers use more code-switching with phrases and clauses than males, which suggests that female L2 learners perceive language input as a whole.