A Study On Teacher's Code-switching In English Majors' Writing Class

Code-switching can be defined as the use of two different languages or language varieties within a single conversation or written text. Since 1950s, American scholars began to study on CS. Although their researches on CS were not mature and most importantly, their attitudes on CS would be mostly negative, yet it is them who realize the existence of CS (Eric,2001). In China, the study on CS started in the early 1990s. In the 21st century, more and more domestic researchers began to do researches on CS. The orientation of researches on CS in English classroom mainly discusses the influence of native language and target language on students. Many researches on classroom CS focus on the functions and aims of two languages. And scholars do researches from the perspective of classroom communication, second language acquisition, teachers'discourse, conversational analysis, pragmatics and ethnography, etc.This paper analyzes teacher's CS in English majors'writing class. The data in this paper comes from class observation and class recording of teacher's CS for teaching six classes of Grade 09 in English department. From observation, analysis and generalization, it is found that teacher's CS can be represented in five aspects: quotation, interjection, reiteration, gaps and word play. Based on the analysis of data, three main types of functions of teacher's CS have been illustrated: methodological functions, affective functions and pragmatic functions. To be specific, methodological functions refer to translation, highlighting, and efficiency. Affective functions refer to encouragement, compliments and criticism, and pragmatic functions refer to taking into account, positive or negative replies. Besides, reasons for teacher's CS have been analyzed from three aspects: adaptability of language, some external conditions of language, social and affective factor of using language. To be specific, external conditions of language refer to users'language proficiency and language using context. Social and effective factors refer to language convergence and divergence that interlocutors use to keep close or distant for showing different relations. Finally, the limitations of this study are pointed out and some suggestions on the use of CS for English learners are given.