Structural Patterns and Grammatical Constraints in Arabic-English Classroom Code-Switching: An Empirical Application of Poplack's Model in Tertiary EFL Contexts

HRMARS - This study investigates the structural configurations of code-switching (CS) among native Arabic-speaking undergraduate students (N = 120) within tertiary English as a Foreign Language (EFL) classroom. Framed within Poplack's (1980) grammatical taxonomy, the research quantifies the frequency and syntactic distributions of inter-sentential, intra-sentential, and tag-switching across 36 hours of audio-recorded classroom discourse. Results reveal a predominant occurrence of intra-sentential switches (54.18%), followed by inter-sentential switches (28.33%) and tag-switches (17.49%). Chi-square analysis indicates that structural CS choices are significantly contingent upon discourse context (?^2(2) = 42.17, p < .001), with peer-to-peer interactions fostering more syntactically complex intra-sentential alternations than student-teacher exchanges. Micro-syntactic parsing demonstrates strict adherence to Poplack's Equivalence and Free-Morpheme constraints, particularly at the boundaries of noun phrases and adjectival modifiers. These findings challenge deficit-oriented pedagogical paradigms by demonstrating that Arabic-English code-switching constitutes systematic, rule-governed linguistic behavior reflective of sophisticated bilingual competence. The paper concludes by proposing a strategic translanguaging framework for tertiary EFL instruction.