Code-mixing of Arabic and English in a university science-teaching context : frequency, grammatical categories, and attitudes

This study explores a language contact phenomenon in the monolingual Arabic-speaking country of Libya. It investigates aspects of Arabic-English code-mixing in a university scientific and technical teaching context. While the language policy in Libya is one which promotes the maintenance and purification of Arabic, and there are ideological barriers against the use of foreign languages (Al-Galley, 1989), English is a guest language that plays an important role in attaining some educational goals, especially at post-secondary levels. For the purpose of this investigation, code-mixing is defined as: the verbal behavior of embedding English words, phrases, sentences, or constituents in Arabic-based instruction. The present study addressed itself to three questions: (1) To what extent does the phenomenon of code-mixing exist in the language of instruction ? (2) Which grammatical categories are susceptible to being rendered by English ? and (3) What are the general trends of students' attitudes toward code-mixing ? (Abstract shortened by UMI.