Abstract: With the advent of globalization, English teachers in the Philippine Educational System have been required to teach their subjects using the English language as the medium of instruction. By doing so, students are expected to graduate or finish language subjects with greater competency in the use of English. Moreover, in the newly approved K- 12 program of the Philippines, one of the competencies that is supposed to be acquired by Filipino students is an effective communication skill which they will be using in the future, given the fact that communicative competence will indeed be a necessity for 21st century learners. Filipino students of today, however, though exposed every day to English via the internet; do not put much effort to learning and understanding the English language. Moreover, not all Filipino learners are capable of learning English through an English-only-policy (EOP) mode of instruction due to the huge linguistic differences between the English language and the Philippine national language (Filipino) as well as other native Philippine languages which are the students’ mother tongues. Thus, there is a big gap between a Filipino student’s mother tongue and the English language which is a foreign language to Filipino students. To address this huge linguistic gap between English and the mother tongue or native language, Teachers in the Philippines have resorted to a Code Switching Strategy in teaching their subjects so as to enable students to easily grasp both the foreign and mother-tongue language. In this strategy, the teacher utilizes English together with some mother-tongue words as exemplars and for clarification of ideas for the sake of in-depth understanding. This study is an attempt to find out if a classroom that uses the Code Switching Strategy as the medium of instruction achieved higher learning levels compared to EOP teaching. Furthermore, this study also tried to determine if the Code Switching Strategy can contribute to better language learning through the use of the mother tongue as a foundation and a bridge for acquiring second language.
Keywords: Code Switching, Medium of Instruction, Code Switching Strategy, Mother Tongue, English as a Second Language, ESL, English Only Policy, DepEd, Philippine K-12Teaching, learning.
Title: Code Switching and Its Implications for ESL Learning
Author: Rhea Dente, Elaika Tibayan, Dyan Marjorie Tan, Luzvie Manalaysay, Michelle Garcia, Jessa Cartel, Jose Carlo Atienza
International Journal of Social Science and Humanities Research
ISSN 2348-3156 (Print), ISSN 2348-3164 (online)
Research Publish Journals
