A Survey Of Chinese-English Code-Switching Among Employees In China Foreign-Invested Enterprises

Code-switching, the alternating use of two or more languages by bilingual or multilingual speakers in the same utterance or conversation, is a common occurrence in foreign-invested enterprises. This paper reports on a survey of Chinese-English code-switching among employees in Foreign-Invested Enterprises (FIEs). The survey was aimed at describing and explaining the actual use of Chinese-English code-switching and the related attitudes towards Chinese-English code-switching among employees in FIEs. The data are collected through field observations and questionnaire surveys; Joshua Fishman's "domain" analysis, Shana Poplack's typology, R. Appel and P. Muysken's function model of Code-switching are used to analyze the data accordingly.First, the data show that topics, settings, and interlocutors are three factors affecting the choice of Chinese-English code-switching in FIEs. Social factors of individual participant may also affect the choice of Chinese-English code-switching. Second, the data collected leads to a typology analysis of the Chinese-English code-switching in the FIEs, showing that the dominant pattern of Chinese-English code-switching in FIEs is intra-sentential code-switching. Finally, the analysis also reveals that as a common speech style among the employees in FIEs, the Chinese-English code-switching serves various functions, such as referential function, phatic function, and poetic function.Two practical implications can be drawn from the findings from this study. One is that as a communicative strategy, Chinese-English code-switching could help an employee to survive in FIEs and to facilitate the interaction with others. Another practical implication relates to the English training FIE employees. English teachers should avoid excessive use of intra-sentential code-switching, because the teacher's language can appear broken, thereby damaging students' confidence in the teacher's language proficiency.