The Motivations of Code-Switching of International Bilingual Students’ Conversations at the University Level

One of the phenomena used by bilingual communities is “code-switching” (henceforth CS). CS is the use of two languages, varieties, or styles observed mostly in the speech of the second or foreign language speakers. Many studies concentrated on what is CS and how it is used by the speakers of the same nationality in schools, but none of them investigates why it is used among bilingual international students. Thus, the current study aims at tackling the various motivations and reasons behind using CS by international bilingual students inside and outside the lectures halls at Universisti Sains Malaysia. This is achieved via a structured interview and a questionnaire that was presented to 20 bilingual participants who are non-native speakers of English from different nationalities and countries. The data analysis shows that all of the students switch their native languages with the English language inside and outside the lectures hall for almost the same reasons among which the most common are the interjection to fill the sentence, the elaboration of a message, and emphasizing a point or idea etc. The study detected new six reasons for which the bilingual may use CS.