Mother or Adapted Tongue: The Discursive and Pragmatic Effects of Code-Switching in Content-Based Learning
Mother or Adapted Tongue: The Discursive and Pragmatic Effects of Code-Switching in Content-Based Learning
Mother or Adapted Tongue: The Discursive and Pragmatic Effects of Code-Switching in Content-Based Learning
11 November 2016
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In effect of this high regard for the English language, the Filipino language, upon the
introduction of English as a formal and professional language in the country, has been used in
informal communication. Agoncillo (1990) stated that the use of the English language was so
pervasive in the Philippines that several English words already made their way into the local
language and consciousness such as in the Tagalog vocabulary: bistik (beef steak), kendi (candy),
ispiker (speaker), and many more.
This phenomenon of prioritizing the English language can be traced back to the onset of
colonization and globalization - two of the global trends that helped and facilitated the dominance
of the language (Sibayan, 1994 as cited by Gonzales, 2004; Ferguson, 2003; Dubner, 2008) in
different parts of the world. In the Philippines, the perception of the positive effects of globalization
has strengthened the establishment of the English language as an international lingua franca and a
communication tool or medium. Schirmer & Shalom (1987) noted that the Filipinos forgot their
native language as they acquired the new language introduced in the American education. Tinio
(1990:86 as cited by Bolton and Bautista, 2004:5) even claimed that the matter of prioritizing
English in the Philippines is a “post-colonial concern that is critically linked to a national culture
and national pride… as the educated elite and unlettered masses tend to see the world in the
American eyes, accepting the American yardstick as the proper standard for measuring any kind of
culture or life.”
In the imperial Manila, more than the tensions that English and Filipino languages pose
against each other and more than the issues of which between the two co-official languages should
be used as the lone legitimate language, hybrid languages have emerged in a form of a code switch.
Taglish is one of the developing results of the tensions between the Philippines’ co-official
languages.
Taglish or “Tagalog-English,” as a code switching tool, started its pervasiveness in
education when former President Ferdinand Marcos proclaimed the bilingual education policy in
the 1970s (Thompson, 2003). Before the introduction of a bilingual education, Tagalog was taught
only as a subject in the curricula. Other areas of education were taught using English.
In the coming years after the declaration of the bilingual policy, debates have emerged on to
the acceptance of the Taglish code switching as the medium of communication in academic
institutions, specifically in giving classroom instructions and in academic discourse, in general. To
further complicate the matter, day, then President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo has renewed a strong
adherence to the English language through an executive order that highlights English as a language
of instruction in the country. This move was made in order to cope up with the dwindling
proficiency of the Filipinos not only in English but also in scientific and mathematical fields that
use English as a medium.
In reality, however, this order appears to be less adhered to. In Metro Manila and other
neighboring provinces, Taglish has been the “informal” language tool or strategy in a classroom set-
up. It is utilized in daily informal conversations among students, even between teachers (Borlongan,
2009). It is the language adapted by the students as the medium of communication in classroom
(Gonzales, 2004; UP Memo on Taglish use, 2008).
Taglish, however, does not create a positive vibe among educators. Gumperz (1982) equated
code switching to incompetence and interference. Bautista (2004) asserted that Taglish is a
“corruption of English and Tagalog languages” and its use as a communication medium showed the
speaker’s lack of knowledge in a specific language, even though most of them were middle-class
and educated. From this study, it was found out that code switching is considered an indicator for
lack of knowledge in a specific language. However, Bautista also believes that code- switching
facilitates communicative efficiency as is the fastest, easiest, and most effective way of saying
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something. The Philippines, therefore, really is a veritable natural laboratory for (Bautista, 1991)
gauging the communicative, pedagogical, and sociolinguistic benefits and problems of CS.
The fourth category is linguistic play. Code switching here is used in order to attain a
humorous effect in using Tagalog or English words (Bautista, 2004). For example: “… tapos dibay-
dibay ang bills.” Dibay-dibay here is derived from the English phrases “divided by” or “to divide.”
Borlongan (2009) did a similar study but instead used Tagalog-English code-switching
practices of teachers and students in English language classes in Metro Manila schools in the
Philippines to determine the frequency of teachers and students code-switch in those classes and
bring to light the forms and functions of the code-switches of both the teachers and students. The
analysis showed that most English language teachers in the sample (11 out of 14 or 78.57%) code-
switch. She further stressed that both the teachers and students “violated” the implementing policy
of “English only” in the Philippines. All classes recorded at least more than one instance of code-
switched utterances. However, though the instances of code-switching could be claimed to be
significant, one’s tendency to code-switch is more of an individual-specific trait.
In the context of this present study, frequency of Bautista’s four communicative efficiency
word-level categories based on Gumperz’s communicative functions is given emphasis in order to
find reasons why students in a content- based general education subject like Natural Science would
code-switch. Therefore:
H1: Frequent use of function and content words of both students and teachers in
content-based science classes lead to more code switching tendencies that aide the
students’ communicative efficiency.
To analyze CS in a different frame, the researchers used Speech Act Theory (Searle,1969)
and relational work (Locher and Watts, 2005) as motivating forces in proving the nature of
participation of both teachers and students in this paper. Speech act is “composed on a
communicative activity (locutionary act) defined with reference to the intention of speakers while
speaking (illocutionary force) and effects achieved on the listeners (perlocutionary) (Crystal,
1991:323). Moreover, Austin (1992) mentions two broad issues critical to the application of speech
act theory to communication analysis: (1) the identification of a speech act in an utterance according
to the rules and conditions set by the theory and (2) the sequential arrangements of the speech acts:
how an initial speech act creates an environment in which a next speech act is (or is not)
appropriate.
John Searle proposed five classifications of illocutionary acts (in Rossi & Siau, 2001). He
categorized utterances as: 1.) Assertive – a category of illocutionary act that enables the relay of
information from the speaker to the hearer. An example of this is: “It’s raining.” 2.) Commissive –
a category of illocutionary act that enables the speaker to commit a specific action in the future. An
example of this is, “I swear to bring it back.” 3.) Expressive – a category of illocutionary act that
conveys the speaker’s preference, attitude, and emotion towards a specific subject. An example of
this is, “I like coffee.” 4.) Directive – a category of illocutionary act that enables the speaker to
direct a specific action to the hearer. An example of this is: “Please bring me salt.” 5.) Declarative –
a category of illocutionary act that enables the speaker to change a current situation. An example of
this is: “I hereby pronounce you husband and wife.”
Relational work, on the other hand, is defined as ‘the ‘work’ communicators invest in
negotiating relationships with others (Locher and Watts, 2005:10) through the crucial use of
language in communication. In the literature, the term relational “work” is derived from Goffman’s
(1967) “facework”. Relational work is preferred, however, because facework has been often
engaged in the literature to refer only to the explanation of the mitigation of face-threatening acts. It
is crucial to recognize that relational work comprises more than just mitigation as it covers the full
range of behavior, from rude and impolite, via normal, appropriate and unmarked, to marked and
polite.
With the following frames as backdrops, the focus of this paper will only be on the
pragmatic-relational work of CS as shown in the illocutionary speech acts of the utterances.
Pragmatics or practical language use (Austin, 1992; Searle, 1969; Rossi & Siau, 2001) enables the
researchers to decipher the meaning and the uses of utterances in a conversation as it allows a
researcher to analyze the intentions of the communicators as they produce utterances. By providing
a list of intentions and actions behind the utterances, the researchers were able to identify the value
and the nature of participation of the students inside the classroom.
Therefore:
H2: the higher the frequency of identified illocutionary acts present in utterances, the
higher the effectiveness of the communication medium in classroom participation.
3. To determine the effects of the Taglish switches on the classroom relational work and
participation of the students.
Two sections of college students under the General Education subject Natural Science
1(NASC 1- The Material Universe) in a Philippine university were used in the study. There were
eighty one (81) students and their professor who participated in the study.
Permission to conduct the research was sought from the professors who were handling
NASC 1 (Natural Science) - a general education course that is focused in Physics. Once granted,
data collection commenced. Over a two-week period, classroom sessions were audio recorded with
students and a teacher. The recordings were transcribed by the researchers as soon as possible. Spot
checks were made as well. The transcribed materials were analyzed for patterns of CS and were
tabulated. There were four limitations in the conduct of study: a.) the researchers were able to
observe the classes in seven (7) weeks, thus the time allocated for the research was constrained, b.)
The schedule of the researchers and the availability of the professor handling the subject permitted
only two sections to be observed, c.) The one and a half hour class schedules of the classes were not
enough for all students to participate, and d.) The researchers weren’t able to give English and
Tagalog proficiency tests before the observations.
The NASC 1 classes conducted their lecture-discussions every Wednesday and Friday for a
semester. In the span of two weeks, the first section (S1) used Taglish as their medium of
communication in classroom discussion while the second section (S2) used English. In S1, the
professor was informed to use the Taglish language as a medium of instruction. Students from S1
were given the freedom to choose whatever language they would want to use inside the classroom.
S2 had the same topic but was taught in English. English was the medium of communication inside
the S2 classroom.
Then, Twelve (12) texts were transcribed from the recorded sessions. These were subjected
to analysis using Bautista’s communicative efficiency categories and Searle’s illocutionary acts.
Frequency counting of used words under Bautista’s list of communicative efficiency was done to
the Taglish words. This was made in order to gauge the type of word-level code switching used by
the students in the classroom. The conversations in Taglish were grouped according to the types of
code switching (function words, content words, idioms, and linguistic play) used.
The effectiveness of the communication medium was gauged using the frequency of
illocutionary speech acts used in the conversation. This was done to determine the type and level of
participation and relational work of both students and teachers in the set up.
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1.7.3 Results
The table shows the frequency of communicative efficiency word usage by a select group of
students in a Philippine university that use Filipino as language of discourse but use English as
discourse markers. Out of 279 words and phrases, the respondents switched to either English or
Filipino functions words the most (216 or 77.42%) , followed by content words (56 or 20.07%) and
linguistic play (7 or 2.5%) the least. Surprisingly, no idioms that used Taglish were heard.
Examples of function words that were used can be seen in the following taken utterances:
Teacher: May animation ako. Lalapit ako sa inyo at ikwento ninyo. Ta-dan. Ano ang
story? Ano ang story, sir? ‘I have an animation. I will go near you to tell a
story. Ta-dan! What is the story’
Student: Si Newton po natutulog sa ilalim ng apple tree tapos nabagsakan siya ng
apple tapos napaisip siya, bakit kaya nahulog yung apple tapos dun niya na-
ano yung gravity. ‘Newton was sleeping under an apple tree then all of a
sudden, the apple fell on his head. It made him think- why did the apple fall?
Then, he realized then what is gravity.’
Teacher: Ang galing ng story. ‘That’s a great story.’
Utterances that contained content words were mostly scientific or content words that have
no direct translation in Tagalog such as “retrograde motion,” “rebirth of learning,” and “renaissance
period.” Samples of embedded words under this category can be seen in the following lines:
Teacher: So, bakit nagkaroon – anong ibig sabihin ng rebirth in relation to
retrograde motion? What happened? ‘So, why was there- what is rebirth in
relation to retrograde motion? What happened?’
Student: Parang, di ba po kasi gawa po ng war, mga war. Parang pagkatapos, diba sa
panahon na yun, uhm, bumagal po yung pagdagdag ng knowledge, yung renai
– renaissance period, uhm, dun po nagsimula uli, parang (i) knowledge po.
‘I think, it has something to do with war, a lot of wars. I think after that
period, uhm, there was a slow period for adding up to knowledge, the
renaissance period, uhm, it started there again, I think, about knowledge.’
Teacher: Oo, ‘yes’ very good. So, revital rebirth of learning.
The third category in communicative efficiency is linguistic play. In this study, this third
category was only used once. Student 1 unintentionally gave a humorous effect in his utterance. The
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speaker was referring to the “crocodile wire” by calling it “alligator tail” and used humor as a
linguistic play in this instance:
Section 1 Section 2
Taglish English English Taglish TOTAL
Assertive 98 91 39 84 312
Expressive 19 15 13 200 247
Commissive 0 0 0 1 1
Directive 6 3 19 216 244
Declarative 0 0 0 1 1
The table shows the frequency of speech acts utterances (805) in the recorded interactions.
Majority of the utterances were categorized as assertives (312) in both English and Taglish set-ups
while commisives and declaratives were only used once. Interestingly, students from both sections
used more speech acts in the Taglish language (625 or 77.63%) than in the English language.
Assertives can be seen in the following sample transcripts. The repetitive use of the phrase
‘there was’ suggested that there are assertives in the sentence. It can be observed that the student
was using an assertive because he/she was using speech in order to convey information regarding a
specific context or subject matter:
Teacher: How did Ptolemy explain the retrograde motion of the planets? And you did
it through… can you raise your hands? You did it… how did you go through
it? Please speak in English.
Student: Um, there were to (incomprehensible) and the guy, um, thought that um, he
will make the planet um, um move against its opposite direction and then
there was a flashback then there was Ptolemy and then um, there was a role
play on the motion of the planets.
Teacher: And there was a short explanation, right?
The next most frequent type of illocution act present in the students’ utterances is the
expressive. The words such as ‘wow,’ ‘ay,’ ‘scary,’ and ‘mainit’ indicated the emotions of the
speaker towards the subject. Most of the time, students used expressive illocutionary act in order to
convey their feelings and attitudes toward the context of the utterance. This type of utterances was
mostly from the Taglish utterances during group activities:
Student 1: Ay!
Student 2: Wow. Scary. Ayan! ‘Wow. It’s scary. Here!’
Teacher: Ilalagay natin sya over the tissue paper. ‘We’ll put it over the tissue paper’
Student 1: Wow.
Student 2: Mainit. ‘It’s hot.’
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Another illocutionary act evident in the students’ utterances was the directive. The directive
illocutionary acts meant two purposes in the students’ utterance. One was giving direction or
command, and the other in the form of question. The utterances in question forms were considered
to be under the directive illocutionary act because they asked for specific actions from the hearers –
to answer questions or to revalidate the meaning of the conveyed message. In these sample
sentences and words below, a student is demanding an explanation from his or her classmate:
Student 1: Explain why na magcoconduct ng heat ito. ‘Explain why it would conduct
some heat.’
Student 2: E kasi…di ba… ‘It’s because… you know…’
Student 1: Bakit? ‘Why?’
Student 2: Siguro kasi eto naka-connect dito. ‘I think it’s because this is connected with
this one.’
The commissive and declarative forms were barely used by the students in their sentences.
In general, most of the utterances used the illocutionary act of assertion, expression, and direction,
as seen from the tables below.
2 DISCUSSION
In the macro sense, it seems that the results point to the prevailing reality that the old
American grammar analysis method of English language teaching and its application to content-
based classes are unfit jigsaw pieces for Filipino learners. The process perhaps of learning the
linguistic values of a target language alongside the learning of content in a Physics classroom lead
to segmented learning.
literatures that state that CS develops pupils’ understanding of subject content (Chan, 2006;
Ferguson, 2009) and humanizes the classroom climate (Bokhorst-Heng, et al., 2009; Probyn, 2009;
McGlynn and Martin, 2009). Inductivo (1994) supports this through a local study that revealed that
code-switching utilized as a medium of verbal expression helped increase the level of participation
and raise the level of understanding of the concepts and themes in Philippine classroom discussions.
The results gathered and the cited literature in this study proved that the Philippine
experience is not an exemption to the code switching phenomenon. Since the adoption of the
bilingual policy in education institutions, students are more open to expressing themselves in
Taglish CS in classroom discussions. Most students had already adapted to the use of code
switching in daily informal social interactions. Therefore, code switching with Taglish as
communication tool could be an alternative for the student’s ease and confidence in conveying their
messages.
3 CONCLUSION
This study attempted to ascertain the word-level communicative efficiency and effects to
participation of Taglish CS of a select group of students taking up a general education course in
Natural Science. From the transcriptions of utterances in the two (2) classroom set-ups, two hundred
sixteen (217) English embedded words and phrases were observed in 559 Taglish utterances made
by students. Students preferred to utter function words in English because the native counterpart
words or phrases were not included in the common lexicon of their everyday conversations in a
classroom set-up. Aside from the function words, English scientific content words in the Taglish
sentences were also manifested as a communicative efficiency tool. These are scientific concepts or
words that have no Tagalog translations nor equivalent words or phrases.
Medium of communication is an important factor to consider in enhancing students’
participation and attitude in a classroom. With more studies that pertain to Taglish a pedagogical
tool, there can be variations in the teacher strategies. For the teachers to be able to maximize the
participation of the students, the following strategies are recommended:
1. Tolerate or allow Taglish in a classroom set-up because using it as a medium will enhance
the students’ performance in conveying information or messages due to its comfort and
efficiency.
2. Encourage intersentential code switching, except for content words, so that students will
still have the greater chance to be proficient in oral and written discourses in both Tagalog
and English language.
3. Test the effect CS in the learning process through oral and written examinations.
4 RECOMMENDATIONS
Future researchers on the matter should consider the following:
1. Students’ separate proficiency in both English and Tagalog languages should be determined
using some pedagogical standards to analyze if code switching is proficiency or deficiency-
driven.
2. The students’ study habits should be included along other demographics as these factors
may affect participation.
3. Video cameras, aside from a sound recorder, should be used in recording the classroom
discussions because facial expressions of students are useful inputs in data gathering. Non-
verbals are equally important indicators of participation.
4. The future researchers should also use quantitative tools in measuring the frequency of
illocutionary acts as well as its communicative efficiency.
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Moreover, this study supports the claim that the “English Only” policy for content-based
instruction seems impractical and ineffective in countries where English is the second or foreign
language. The findings offer strong indications that code-switching by teachers and students should
not be deduced as incompetence in teaching and ineffectiveness to understand because code-
switching in content subjects is a bilingual speaker’s communicative skill. It seems that Taglish as a
CS must be perceived without reluctance as a bilingual practice and a useful communicative
resource.
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