A Comparative Study Of Teacher's Code-switching And English-only Explanations On The Acquisition Of Attributive Clause In Senior High English Grammar Teaching

Whether L1 should be used in the second or foreign language classroom has received an increasing amount of attention in the field of second language acquisition.So the controversial debate on using L1/L2,code-switching or L2-only has greatly attracted many researchers' attention.Based on this,the study has continued to investigate whether teacher's code-switching or English-only explanations in English grammar class provides more benefits for English learners by adopting empirical research method.In this study,teacher's code-switching refers to the alternation between English and Chinese when the teacher teach attributive clause in senior high English grammar teaching.So research questions are put forward as follows: 1)Is students' receptive grammar knowledge acquisition of attributive clause better facilitated by code-switching or by English-only explanations in grammar achievement tests in senior high grammar teaching class? 2)Is students' productive grammar knowledge acquisition of attributive clause better facilitated by code-switching or by English-only explanations in grammar achievement tests in senior high grammar teaching class? 3)What are the students' attitudes towards code-switching and English-only explanations in the grammar class?Specifically,the study examines the effect of teacher's code-switching and English-only explanations on the acquisition of attributive clause in NO.1 Dingxi Senior High School.112 students in two parallel classes in Grade 1 were randomly chosen to be the participants.Meanwhile,the Switching Replications design was used,which makes sure every participant can be taught both in code-switching and English-only explanations.After the treatments,two grammar achievement tests which consist of receptive grammar knowledge and productive grammar knowledge for attributive clause were done respectively.In receptive grammar knowledge part,there are multiple choice and filling blanks and the total points are 30 while in productive grammar knowledge part,there are Rational Cloze,translation and polishing the passage,which are 37 points in total.After grammar tests,an open-ended questionnaire which concerns with students' instructional language preference to teach grammar,students' attitudes to the advantages and disadvantages of code-switching and English-only explanations to teach English and overall attitudes to the use of code-switching and English-only explanations to teach English in general and also an interview were conducted with the participants.The data was adopted and analyzed by the software,SPSS22.0.The results are follows:Firstly,the study finds that code-switching is more effective than English-only explanations in the receptive grammar knowledge acquisition of attributive clause in senior high English grammar teaching.The possible reasons may be teacher's code-switching is direct and easy for learners to have a better understanding for receptive grammar knowledge.Secondly,from two grammar achievement tests for productive grammar knowledge after using the switching replication experiments,the study finds that English-only explanations has significant an advantage over code-switching in the productive grammar knowledge acquisition of attributive clause in senior high English grammar teaching.Because English-only explanations offered by teachers will supply more context for language use.Thirdly,from the results of the open-ended questionnaire and interview,the study finds that at present,although about 69.09% of students support code-switching in English teaching and learning,they still express a preference for teaching English grammar with English-only if possible in the future.Finally,the present study shows the limitations and implications for the future research.The participants are students in Grade 1 in senior high school and because of the limitation of internship,the experiment time is so limited that only attributive clause is taught and tested.Further researches could solve above limitations and study other dimensions such as listening,reading and writing.