Code-switching in Botswana’s ESL Classrooms: A Paradox of Linguistic Policy in Education
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Code-switching in the classroom is known to take place across a wide range of subjects in multilingual settings in Africa and, indeed, throughout the world; yet it is often regarded pejoratively by some educational policy makers. This article looks at code-switching (CS) in Botswana’s senior secondary schools within the context of the country’s language-in-education policy, which states that English is the official language of learning and teaching while Setswana is the national language used for identity, unity and national pride. The data are derived from an ethnographic study conducted at four high schools in the north-eastern part of the country, which is uniquely multilingual. The findings indicate that code-switching from English to Setswana is quite prevalent in content subjects, and is used as a pedagogic resource to clarify the knowledge of the subject matter and to reduce the social distance between the teacher and learners. From the findings, it is suggested that code-switching in ESL classrooms in Botswana should be recognized not only as a communicative strategy for instruction, but also as a way of creating classroom warmth and friendliness.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.287 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".