A Study Of Teacher Code-switching In College English Classrooms Of Arts And Sports Majors

Recent years, code-switching has become a hot topic for linguists. Study ofcode-switching between mother tongue and target language in the same turn orsuccessive turns is very important in English class. Its role in the College Englishteaching for arts and sports majors cannot be ignored.Compared with English majors and other non-English majors, the Englishfoundation of arts and sports majors is commonly poor, so it is hard for those studentsin an all-English class to fulfill the planned teaching task, thus code-switching in suchclass is inevitable. The researcher has recorded the College English classes of arts andsports majors by6teachers at Xiangnan University, gathered many practical examplesof teacher code-switching, and through questionnaires, surveyed the attitudes of16teachers (including6teachers whose classes are recorded in this study) and180students, and the students expectations on the contexts of teacher s use ofcode-switching. A qualitative and quantitative way has been conducted in this study.The results of the above research show that code-switching has been frequentlyused in College English classrooms of arts and sports majors by those teachers, andthat inter-sentential code-switching is more often used than intra-sententialcode-switching. Most students and teachers take positive attitudes toward teachercode-switching; Students hold the greatest expectation of teacher code-switchingwhen they try to understand and master English knowledge, while it is lower forteacher s class management. Conversational analysis of classroom recordingsindicates that three kinds of code-switching structures are used in College Englishteaching of arts and sports majors, namely, inter-sentential code-switching,intra-sentential code-switching and tag switching; and such code-switching byteachers can be used in teacher-student interactions as turn-taking, repair andpreference organizations. Based on Rolin-Ianziti＆Brtownlie s coding scheme and statistics got in this research, it has been discovered that code-switching is mainlyemployed for translation, communicative and meta-linguistic uses. Finally, it isconcluded that teacher s use of code-switching is mainly affected by students Englishproficiency, situational factors and cross-linguistic differences between Chinese andEnglish.This paper can enrich the research in the field of teacher code-switching bystudying it in English classrooms of arts and sports majors. I hope this study can helpteachers build a positive attitude to the use of teacher code-switching in classrooms ofarts and sports majors and make popper use of code-switching so as to effectivelypromote College English teaching for arts and sports majors.