EFFECT OF CODE SWITCHING ON PRE-NCE STUDENTS ACHIEVEMENT IN MATHEMATICS: A STUDY OF FCE, KATSINA

Abstract

This study investigated the effect of code switching on Pre-NCE students’ achievement in Mathematics, the study was carried out in Federal College of Education Katsina, the Pre-NCE students admitted in 2019/2020 session into mathematics related courses were used for the study. All the students that were given admission were used, they are 30 in number but two of them were exempted because they are non- Hausa speakers. Two of their second semester courses Mechanics (MAT 023) and Statistics (MAT 024) were used for the research. The students were taught a topic from the two courses at a different time with English language only, they were examined by the course lecturer, they were taught the same topic after one week using code switching, they were also tested by the course lecturer. Hypotheses were tested using student t statistic at 0.05 level of significance, the calculated t for Statistics is 5.326 and that of Mechanics is 3.674, the p values are 0.000 and 0.002 respectively, the null hypotheses were rejected. The findings indicated that the Pre-NCE students perform better when their course lecturer alternate between the official language of instruction and their first language. It was recommended that lecturers should be encouraged to alternate between the learners’ first language and the official language of instruction when teaching mathematics and also code switching should not be seen as an abomination in a mathematics classroom in our schools.