Reasons for teacher's code-switching at primary school classes of bilingual Turkish-Persian districts

Despite the significance given to code-switching as a common linguistic phenomenon among bilinguals around the world, the reasons for which teachers in Turkish Persian classes–which are supposed to be run in Persian–resort to codeswitching have not been intimately explored. In the first section of the present study, the data were collected from a primary school by tape recording and note taking from interactions taking place between bilingual teachers (n = 4) and their students. It was found that bilingual teachers in this study tended to use students L1 to serve a number of pedagogic and social functions. For the second section of the study, however, a questionnaire was developed to elicit bilingual teacher's (n = 305) reasons for resorting to code-switching in elementary classes. The Friedman test run on the data collected from the questionnaire indicated that the majority of respondents agreed with code-switching in elementary schools, but they appeared to credit different reasons for such a change from Persian to Turkish in their classes. Code-switching mostly occurrs in the classroom to cater for the needs of the students. Code-switching functions justify its use in the class, but it shoud be used in some restricted activities.