“Turn it on, Tamam ”—an exploratory study of code-switching in nursing simulation training discourse in an English-medium instruction context

This study investigates code-switching as an interactional phenomenon in an academic setting where English serves as the official medium of instruction (EMI), and Arabic is the participants’ shared first language. The study adopts a qualitative discourse-analytic approach to examine the occurrence of code-switching, its triggers, and its communicative functions in naturally occurring nursing simulation training sessions. The data comprise 1079 instances of code-switching obtained from recorded academic nursing simulation sessions involving female Saudi trainees and faculty members. Discourse analysis focused on code-switching positions, triggers, and functions. The study revealed that code-switching is a common and systematically employed feature of this discourse. It occurs both intrasententially and intersententially, largely adhering to the equivalence constraint rule proposed by Poplack. In this context, code-switching is mostly used in response to performance errors, critical interactions, emotional tension, topic shifts, and speaker preference. Its functions include reinforcing group solidarity, regulating interactional pace, managing tension, checking comprehension, and reiterating or eliciting information. Code-switching in this dataset was shown to follow grammatical boundaries of both languages.