Code-Switching as an Interactional Resource in Nigerian Multilingual Classrooms
Abstract
This paper explores the concept of code-switching as an interactive resource of multilingual classroom discourse in the framework of teaching practice oversight. The research is based on a Conversation Analysis (CA), which analyzes the classroom dialogue that happens naturally and is recorded in December 2025 at Government Junior Secondary School in Gwagwalada, Abuja. The researchers gathered the data in the process of the routine pre-service teacher teaching practice supervision by the Department of Arts Education of the University of Abuja. Audio-video lessons in the classrooms were recorded and ten interactional excerpts were chosen to be analyzed finely and, on a turn, -by-turn basis. The results indicate that teachers and students code-switch sequentially and strategically employ code-switching to achieve pedagogic acts of clarification, repair, classroom management, participation management and affective alignment. Instead of indicating linguistic incompetence, code-switching develops as a local interactional source that fosters teaching and learning advancement and inclusion. The study also makes its contribution to the research on the classroom discourse in that it presents both empirical evidence of classroom contexts in Nigerian junior secondary schools and prefigures the teaching practice settings as the areas of interaction to be analyzed with the help of interactional theory.
Keywords
code-switching; multilingual classrooms; classroom discourse; conversation analysis; interactional resources Dataset directory: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.31341463
References
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