Code-switching in Rwanda: A case study of Kigali City Secondary Schools

This paper investigates the phenomenon of code-switching (CS) in three schools in Kigali City, the capital of Rwanda, an essentially monolingual country with Kinyarwanda as the mother tongue of all Rwandans and French as a second language. In schools, both these languages served as mediums of instruction until 2009, when there was a sudden move by the government of Rwanda to introduce English as the sole medium of instruction in all schools, catching both teachers and students unprepared for this change. Hence, the general observation is that one of the strategies teachers and students employ to overcome the obstacles to teaching and learning in English is CS. Using questionnaires and focus group interviews, this paper looks at CS in secondary classrooms in three districts in Kigali City and addresses three questions: (i) whether CS is an unmarked feature in Rwandan schools; (ii) the extent to which CS is prominent in the classroom; and (iii) the languages being switched