Qualitative analysis of code-switching with reference to gender and pragmatic functions in Indian students at Oxford

Thesis

Past research on code-switching (CS) has attempted to establish that CS is used more due to fashion or as a mark of modernization (Kachru, 1978; Pillalamori, 2018). It is also considered to be a mark of familiarity in an informal context; teachers in classroom contexts use it to make the classroom teaching less formal and also to simplify the teaching material. Although CS is more common in out–of--classroom (Jacobson, 1997), informal contexts, a lot of research (Macaro, 2001; Grit & Jennifer, 2004) has been done on formal classroom settings; that on informal out-of-the-classroom context is less (Si, 2011; Kashpolia & Ong, 2015). Two of the researches in these informal contexts that have been identified talk about CS in Bollywood films and linguistic analysis of CS in billboard advertisements. To date, there is no study that probes into CS in an informal, out-of-classroom, Anglophone context.

This dissertation contributes to fill this identified research gap. The data for analysis has been taken from group elicitation (GE) and stimulated recall (SR) conducted in an informal Anglophone context, based on three broad research questions on gender, CS patterns, and pragmatics. The key findings demonstrate that gender is not decisive in finding the CS patterns, which in this study are confined to intra and inter-sentential CS. The range of pragmatic markers used by Indian speakers of English while CS differed from male respondents to the female ones. The findings from this research suggest that a linguistic analysis of CS patterns and study of pragmatic functions in comparison with L1 and L2 could contribute significantly in extension of knowledge about Indian users of English in informal out-of-classroom context.

Authors: Arora, A

• DOI: 10.5287/ora-gwx7rvkbg
• Type of award: MSc
• Level of award: Masters
• Awarding institution: University of Oxford
• Language: English