Code-switching In The Academic Classroom: Optimization For Communication

With more and more frequent interactions between nations of diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds, code-switching as a prominent phenomenon resulting from continual language contact has attracted increasing attention. Apart from researches on language alternation in natural conversations, investigations of code-switching in the educational setting have also gained momentum. By collecting data in means of recording lectures of Semantics addressed to about 30 third-year postgraduate linguistics major students, this paper attempts to examine socio-psychological motivations for code-switching within the Markedness Model framework proposed by Carol Myers-Scotton, with a specific focus on code-switching in this academic classroom, where the content of lessons receives much more emphasis, compared with foreign language classrooms where language forms are attached importance to so that foreign language proficiency can be cultivated. It is argued that speakers make linguistic choices as individuals, driven by the rationality mechanism pursuing maximized rewards and minimized costs. In addition, acquiring its own characteristics, code-switching in the academic classroom is adopted as an unmarked choice, a communicative strategy for maintaining teacher-student relationship, which is considerably different from that in the foreign language classroom.