A Comparative Study Of Code-switching In Junior Middle School EFL Teaching

Along with the acceleration of the process of economic globalization and the rapid development of information technology, the communication between different parts of the world is becoming more and more frequent, which is also teemed with the language communication. Under this background, more and more people master two or more codes, so as to become bilingual or multilingual speakers. Switching between different codes by bilingual or multilingual speakers forms a special language phenomenon, namely code-switching. Code-switching, as an interesting linguistic study, has become the research subjects in Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics, and Pragmatics, etc. But code-switching study in foreign language teaching is particularly prominent. In foreign language teaching, the target language has to undertake the special double identities, as the intermediary language for teaching and the teaching content, so the relationship and effects of the target language and native language in foreign language teaching are always the focus of foreign language teaching study. Until now, in foreign language teaching study, there is still a dispute over whether foreign language teaching should adopt target language only in teaching or should rely on native language to teach.This thesis is the comparative study of code-switching in middle school EFL teaching. The researcher conducts the questionnaire, classroom observation and interviews in two middle schools, with25students and their English teacher from each school. One school is a typical total English teaching school, and the other one is general middle school, where Chinese is mixed with English in English teaching. The present research mainly includes three aspects:teachers’motivations of code-switching and students’attitudes to it, the teachers’ code-switching in teaching different language skills, and the effects of code-switching on students’interest in learning and language outcome. Based on the analysis of the results, it is not difficult to conclude code-switching can be perceived as the teacher’s adaptation of their different roles in teaching and the adaptation of language reality. Although code-switching can realize the adaptation in teaching, it is not "panacea". When adopting code-switching, the teacher needs to consider students’ language proficiency backgrounds and learning motivations.With the constant development of foreign language teaching in China, we are looking forward to more targeted implications for teaching. This thesis also gives pertinent suggestions and implications for both schools involved in the research, such as in foreign languages school, to appropriately adopt code-switching, and to implement stratified teaching by instilling more code-switching for underachievers, for the purpose of helping them understand the lessons; in general middle school, to apply more situational teaching with only English in teaching, which could assist students in forming an English way of thinking, so as to finally reach the goal of acquiring the ability to speak fluent and idiomatic English.