The Sociolinguistic Analysis Of Teachers' Code-switching In College English Instruction

For the past few years, the study of code-switching has been the focus in various fields. Researchers study it from different perspectives and score plentiful achievements. In China, there are relatively few empirical researches on teachers'code-switching, and much fewer on teachers'code-switching from the sociolinguistic perspective. This study can be supplemental to the researches on code-switching in China.From the perspective of sociolinguistics, and based on sociolinguist Myers-Scotton's Markedness Model, the present study is trying to explore teachers'motivations for code-switching in college English classroom with the qualitative research approach. Through the analysis of the data from classroom observations and audio-recordings, it reveals that teachers'code-switching is a universal phenomenon in English classroom, and it tends to be in use English/Chinese, discourse roles and address forms by which teachers reach some functional aims. These functions include translation, facilitating students'understanding, class management, attracting students'attention, emphasis, evaluation and feedback, lessening students'anxiety, humor and expressing intimacy and solidarity. Moreover, this study further explores the underlying factors that motivate teachers to do these functional code-switching under the framework of Markedness Model. The results show that teachers switch code to enhance rewards and minimize costs, namely, optimization. At the same time, teachers also want to negotiate the rights and obligations set (the relationship between participants who expect and agree to observe in a given interaction type). Specifically, choosing the unmarked choice is to maintain or affirm the current unmarked rights and obligations set, while choosing the marked choice is to establish a new set of unmarked rights and obligations set. Finally, after the analysis of the markedness of teachers'code-switching, the conclusion reveals that teachers' code-switching is mainly a marked choice in college English classroom, for the negotiation of a new set of rights and obligations, seeking to optimize the effects of both teaching and communicationDespite the limitations of this study, it still is significant for the English teaching and teacher training to some extent.