Motivations For Code-switching Of Rural Middle School Teachers In Classroom Teaching Of Chinese

With the social development, language contact has become more and more frequent. The interaction between languages produces linguistic changes at phonetic, lexical and syntactical levels, such as code-switching (CS), loanwords, pidgin, creole, etc. CS has always been the common linguistic phenomenon of language contact in China, a multiethnic and multidialectal country.Under the guidance of Putonghua instruction policy, dialect gradually withdraws from classroom teaching process and Putonghua becomes the main instruction language in Chinese classroom of urban middle schools. However, there still exists Putonghua /dialect CS in broad rural middle schools. The teacher's CS in classroom teaching process, especially Putonghua/dialect CS, has attracted increasing attention in recent years. According to markedness model, Putonghua/dialect CS is the unmarked code choice made by Chinese teachers after they have taken the national language policies, personal characteristics and the teaching realities into consideration.Taking Gaoping Middle School in Oujiangcha town of Yiyang city as an example, the research adopts the data collection technique of observation to record and take note of six Chinese teachers'natural speeches in the classroom teaching process, obtaining a large collection of Putonghua/Yiyang dialect CS examples. Then interview and questionnaire survey are conducted as supplements to collect data for the analysis of the six teachers and 140 students'attitudes towards CS. All the data are processed by Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS 13.0) through descriptive analysis, crosstabs section and one-way ANOVA to investigate the motivations for teachers'CS in the classroom teaching of Chinese in rural middle schools.The research finds out teachers constantly carry out Putonghua/dialect CS in the classroom teaching process in rural middle schools. Among Putonghua/dialect CS, intrasentential CS is much more than intersentential CS and the notional word switching is more than the function word switching. Pronoun, modal particle and noun are the top three words that have the highest switching degree. CS is mainly used for emotion expression, text quotation, effective communication, repetition, conformity, authority expression, humor creation, topic shift, aesthetic effect and language formality, etc. Teachers'CS types have close relationship with their Putonghua proficiency: the higher Putonghua level they have, the less intrasentential they carry out. It also finds out the students'familiarity with certain variety and recognition of its status can greatly determine their attitudes towards the CS in which this variety is involved. Most students can accept the teachers'Putonghua/dialect CS and do not think it causes any trouble in the classroom interaction. However, they still hope the teachers can increase Putonghua proficiency and use Putonghua as the main instruction language. They think intrasentential CS should be less used in the classroom.Influenced by the Putonghua instruction policy, the teachers speak more Putonghua during the classroom teaching process than before. But it is still acceptable for the teachers to carry out Putonghua/dialect CS. To improve the teaching quality, the teachers should not only follow the state language policy to improve their Putonghua proficiency, but also know how to use dialect appropriately for knowledge instruction and classroom management. Meanwhile, the state language policy should be implemented step by step and adjust to local conditions.Study on standard dialect/regional dialect CS can be a complex subject. The findings and conclusion of this thesis are rather preliminary, which require further research at a more general level.