Relationship between Socio-demographic, Classroom Code-Switching and Vocabulary Acquisition Strategies among First Year Students

Abstract

This study aimed to determine the relationship between socio-demographic, classroom code-switching, and vocabulary acquisition strategies of first year students at the Visayas State University-Tolosa campus. Moreover, it aimed to evaluate the relationships between code-switching and the sociodemographic profile of the respondents; vocabulary acquisition strategies and socio-demographic profile; and code-switching usage and vocabulary acquisition strategies. Respondents were randomly selected - 10 and 15 participants - from the two blocks (per program) and the survey was done through two sets of questionnaires sent through a Google form. The socio-demographic profile data, code switching usage, and vocabulary acquisition strategies were analyzed using descriptive statistics. Chisquare and Spearman’s rho correlation were used to test relationships among the variables. Results showed that students basically “agree” with the items written under classroom code-switching, and “often” they do vocabulary acquisition strategies. Further, results revealed that there are no significant relationships between socio-demographic profile and code-switching usage, and socio-demographic
profile and vocabulary acquisition strategies regardless of the respondents’ age, sex, Mother Tongue and type of school attended. Although the use of either of the two techniques such as code-switching and vocabulary acquisition strategies seemed effective based from several studies, the present study revealed that there is no significant relationship between them. This would mean that students still learn the English language in any of the two ways. Thus, perceived with no positive trait by schools and the language teachers, all educators were advised to take lead in establishing some restrictions on codeswitching to achieve mastery in language learning.