The Reasons of Using Code Switching for English Education Students in Facebook at Universitas Kristen Satya Wacana Salatiga, Indonesia

Abstract

This study explores some important issues, namely the occurrences of code switching and the reasons why the respondents switch their language in communicating in Facebook. The study involved the students of English Language and Art who had already signed up as Facebook users as the respondents. In this study, the data were the Facebook statuses and comments used by the respondents and the responses of the questionnaires. To identify code switching reasons in the Facebook statuses and comments, Hoffman (1992) was used as the basis of interpretation to investigate the reasons why the respondents switch their language in Facebook statuses and comments. The data (selected statuses comments and questionnaire) were analyzed by several steps, namely identifying the occurrences of code switching from statuses comments, classifying the code switching in the form of tables, quantifying the frequency and the percentage of code switching according to the reasons, analyzing and discussing the data obtained. The results show that there are seven reasons of code switching in Facebook statuses and comments. In terms of the reasons, talking about particular topic tends to be the most frequent reason (25%). In relation to language combination used in Facebook statuses and comments, English – Indonesia is likely to be the most frequent language combination.