What sentential code do E.F.L. students switch to ? : the case of L2 students of english at the university of bordj bou arreridj

الملخص EN

The present paper investigates a very sociolinguistic phenomenon resulting from the linguistic contact in a multilingual setting.

It attempts to shed some light on the phenomenon of code-switching as practised naturally in a very social learning environment: inside the classroom.

In this educational context, code-switching is frequently found in the EFL classroom which represents a real social life as many classroom researchers have claimed.

In an attempt to find answers to the motives behind students' resort to code-switching and what type of code-switching they tend to use, the researcher, being also a University teacher of English, opted for a highly qualitative method employing a structured in-class observation followed by interviews with two students as research tools.

The data collected from the corpus made up of twenty students' linguistic exchanges, and the interview show that EFL students practise code-switching to fulfil both communicative and social needs.

In the classroom context, inter-sentential code-switching is practised deliberately to serve as exposures for students and also an indicator that these students are fluent bilingual speakers.

Meanwhile, intra-sentential code-switching is not really a deliberate action, but rather a force of habit from the part of the participants as multilingual speakers.