Motivations For Code-switching Of Middle School Teachers In English Classroom

With the rapid development of global economy and information exchange, there are more and more various language contacts. In everyday life, especially for the bilingual or multilingual communities, one language or language variety may switch to another language or language variety during the interaction, which is called code switching (CS) by linguists. And CS has become the focus of concern of linguists since it appeared in the 1960s.As a foundation course in middle school, English has already possessed its own teaching system for years of development. English has long been required to be taught with the immersion teaching method; the mother language--Chinese has long been considered as a big taboo in foreign language classrooms. However, due to several reasons: the insufficiency of English environment, the limitation of teachers'language ability, the difficulty of students'English input and the special motivations of teachers, it is a very common language phenomenon for teachers to make CS between English and Putonghua in English class of middle school. And there even exists CS between English, Putonghua and dialect in English classes of middle schools in counties or villages.Based on the theory of code-switching and adaptation, through sociolinguistic research methods, this study first adopts the methods of classroom observation to collect abundant data of teachers'CS by recording six English teachers'classes in three grades in Beishan Middle School of Longhui and emphatically discusses teachers'motivations for CS in English class and its influencing factors of CS by statistically analyzing the collected data. The study then supplementally investigates language attitudes toward this language phenomenon of 150 students in three grades in this school by a questionnaire. Finally, the study analyses the data obtained quantitatively with the mathematical statistics methods with helps from GOLDVARB X, SPSS (13.0) and Excel (2007).It is found that the motivations of middle school English teachers'CS are to adapt to teachers'linguistic reality, social conventions and psychological motivations. It is a kind of language choice and special teaching strategy of English teachers. Students'grades or English proficiency, teachers'gender and years of teaching are factors which have certain influence on teachers'CS, while teachers'educational background has no direct relationship with their CS in class. Middle school English teachers proceed with three forms of CS: English/Putonghua CS, Putonguhua/dialect CS and English/dialect CS. Students hold a positive attitude toward English/Putonghua CS, but a negative attitude toward teachers'CS between dialect and other languages. They believe that based on the policy of popularization of Putonghua nationwide, teachers should take a lead on promoting Putonghua and decrease or avoid the use of dialect in English class.CS used by middle school English teachers is a kind of language choice, a communication strategy and a highly flexible language behaviour based on the adaptation principle. It concretely embodies the adaptation to bilingual or multilingual teaching and by thus possesses practical meaning to middle school's English teaching. Middle school English teachers'appropriate use of CS at appropriate time in class should be affirmed and supported by both students and teachers in the educational world, whereas the excessive use of CS in class should be avoided or completely eradicated as much as possible.Due to the limitations of the present research, the findings and conclusions of this study are relatively preliminary, which requires further researches on a more general level.