A Pragmatic Analysis Of Teachers' Codeswitching In College English Instruction

Codeswitching is the alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance or conversation. The foreign researchers have studied whether foreign language teachers should apply codeswitching in teaching since the 1960s. Some scholars, such as Anton, Belz and Vivian Cook, believe that foreign language teachers should use codeswitching as a pedagogical strategy; that is, use mother language under the principle of maximizing the target language in order to avoid misunderstanding and impractical teaching.This thesis, based on Jef Verschueren's Adaptation Theory and Yu Guodong's theoretical framework of Adaptation Model (2001), is a pragmatic analysis of the codeswitching of College English teachers; that is, a detailed analysis of the pragmatic adaptation that teachers'codeswitching can fulfill.This study adopts both the qualitative and quantitative research methods to collect the data from 5 teachers'College English classes in Changchun University of Science and Technology. The results of audio recording, observation and interview show that these teachers frequently utilize codeswitching in all categories in order to make adaptation that helps realize or approach one or more particular pedagogical aims. Firstly, they adapt to linguistic reality in attempt to cover the differences of semantic features between Chinese and English. Secondly, they adapt to their roles, both"the macro-roles"of setting examples and being admired and"the micro-roles", for example, assessor, participant and promoter. Finally, they adapt to their psychological intentions, such as authenticity keeping, understanding facilitating and highlighting.Teachers'codeswitching utilized as a strategy in the process of teaching must have some influence on the students'language learning, therefore, the paper presents a statistic analysis of 317 students'evaluations on teachers'codeswitching by using the designed questionnaire so as to lay a foundation for further study. The result shows that students have positive attitudes to teachers'codeswitching used to explain semantic differences between English and Chinese, facilitate understanding, analyze difficult grammar and creating humor; and low-proficiency students show negative attitudes to their teachers'codeswitching used to highlight linguistic points and make evaluations.Finally the thesis suggests that teachers should take codeswitching as an effectively communicative strategy in the process of foreign language instruction and should use codeswitching more perceptively.