Code-Switching Patterns and Pragmatic Competence Among Multilingual University Students: A Corpus-based Study

Project Abstract

This study investigates code-switching practices and pragmatic competence among multilingual university students, employing a corpus-based methodology to quantify patterns, motivations, and communicative functions across academic and social contexts. A mixed-methods approach integrates a large-scale oral and written corpus compiled from 300 participants across three language groups in a multilingual university setting, supplemented by targeted conversational interviews and pragmatic judgment tasks. The corpus was annotated for language alternation boundaries, discourse markers, polarity items, stance expressions, and code-switching triggers such as topic domain, interlocutor relations, and social identity cues. Pragmatic competence was assessed through perception-based acceptability judgments, miscue analysis in pragmatic violations, and production tasks designed to elicit politeness strategies, speech acts, and discourse management in both formal and informal registers. Initial quantitative analyses reveal distinctive code-switching patterns contingent on participants’ proficiency levels, language dominance, and domain of discourse. In academic settings, participants exhibit constrained but functionally essential switches to signal epistemic stance, source attribution, and technical precision, often aligning with disciplinary jargon and conceptual metaphors borrowed from dominant languages. In social interactions, switches serve as identity performance, solidarities, humor, and accommodation strategies, with higher rates observed in peer groups sharing translanguaging repertoires. The study identifies a robust association between code-switching frequency and pragmatic scoring moderate, strategically deployed switches correlate with higher pragmatic acceptability and perceived communicative competence, whereas abrupt, unstructured switching correlates with reduced pragmatic clarity and misinterpretation by interlocutors lacking bilingual proficiency. Qualitative analyses highlight five core functions of code-switching indexing social identity and solidarity; aiding discourse coherence through cohesion devices; signaling epistemic stance and evidentiality; managing politeness and face-work; and facilitating access to specialized knowledge and cognitive load management during complex tasks. The corpus-derived insights are triangulated with interview narratives that reveal perceived constraints, such as assessment policies, classroom norms, and evaluative biases against non-dominant language use, which influence participants’ strategic choices. Pragmatic competence emerges as a dynamic construct, with learners exhibiting adaptive competence by calibrating formality, politeness strategies, and directness based on interlocutor expectations and cultural norms. The findings have implications for language teaching, assessment design, and policy in multilingual higher education. Recommendations include developing translanguaging-informed curricula that validate multilingual repertoires, integrating pragmatic competence training across genres, and creating assessment rubrics that recognize functional code-switching as a legitimate communicative resource. The study also contributes to corpus-based methodologies for sociolinguistic analysis by providing a richly annotated bilingual/multilingual corpus suitable for cross-context comparison and replication across similar multilingual university ecosystems.

Project Overview

What This Project Is About

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A plain-language overview of the topic and what the project investigates. It looks at how multilingual university students switch between languages in everyday talk and how such choices relate to pragmatic skills like making requests, giving feedback, or agreeing with others. A corpus-based approach means the researcher will collect real spoken or written samples, organize them into a structured dataset, and analyze patterns across languages to see how often and in what contexts code-switching happens and how it affects clear communication.

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The Problem It Addresses

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Many universities host students who speak several languages, yet there is limited understanding of how switching languages affects everyday communication and social interaction. Without clear insights, educators may miss practical ways to support learning, inclusion, and smoother collaboration in multilingual classrooms and online forums.

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Objectives of the Project

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1. Describe how often and in which situations students switch between languages.
2. Identify the pragmatic functions of code-switching (e.g., emphasis, clarification, signaling group identity).
3. Examine whether code-switching helps or hinders message clarity in peer interactions.
4. Assess correlations between language proficiency levels and switching patterns.
5. Provide practical recommendations for teaching and assessment in multilingual settings.

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What You Will Do Step by Step

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1. Review existing studies on code-switching and pragmatics to frame the project.
2. Collect corpus data from interviews, conversations, or classroom interactions with multilingual students.
3. Annotate data for languages used, switching points, and pragmatic functions.
4. Quantify switching frequency and analyze context conditions (topic, setting, interlocutors).
5. Analyze how switching relates to pragmatic success or misunderstandings.
6. Compare results across languages and proficiency levels.
7. Interpret findings in light of language learning and social communication theories.
8. Draft implications for teaching, assessment, and further research.

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Expected Outcome

Anticipated outcomes include a clearer map of when and why students code-switch, evidence on its impact on pragmatic clarity, and practical guidance for educators to support effective multilingual communication in academic contexts.