A Research On The Vocational College English Teachers’ Code-Switching Under The Adaptation Theory

Code-switching is mainly about the alternate use of two or more languages in the sameconversation episode．As a common and popular language phenomenon, code-switching hasreceived wide attention and research. Whether English teachers should use their nativelanguage or target language is still a very disputable question. Many scholars believe thatcode-switching in English class hampers effective English teaching. Thus they do not approveof the change between target language and native language. The appearance of theaudio-lingual method and communicative teaching method made pure target languageteaching method even more popular. Linguists hold different attitudes towards on the situationwhether teachers should use English or Chinese in English class. As a result, many languageteachers face the dilemma which language should be used in teaching．Recently，as sociolinguistics and applied linguistics have developed rapidly，a number ofscholars have already researched and found out which language should be used in Englishclassrooms from an empirical point of view．Because of this, this research mainly focuses onthe code-switching in vocational college English classrooms under the Adaptation Theory,aiming to find out the current situation of code-switching in non-English classes in vocationalcollege, analyzing the pragmatic functions of code-switching and trying to find which aspectdoes code-switching have the most effective influence to students’ learning.The data resources in this research come from three channels: classroom recordings,teacher interviews and questionnaires. The subjects who answered questionnaires were18teachers,120animation-majored students with certain English levels and98computer-majored students with almost no language knowledge. The questionnaires mainlyare for to finding out teachers’ and students’ attitudes toward code-switching in class, theinfluence of code-switching on teaching and learning and which aspect does code-switching ismost effective on students’ learning. The classroom recordings come from five teachers’25classes in total. The author chose teachers who were different in age and gender in order tomake sure the variety of the subjects.After analyzing and organizing the data and materials, the author finds that Englishteachers’ code-switching in class has more positive influence than negative influence.Vocational college English teachers use many different kinds of code-switching in class.Actually, code-switching in English class is an adaptation process. It is to adapt to languagereality, social conventions, teachers’ roles and psychological motivations of teachers in orderto achieve a certain teaching aim. Through the investigation, it is found that many studentsaccept and approve English teachers of using proper amount of Chinese because they think that will be helpful for them to understand the contents, analyze the difficult grammaticalsentence structure and lighten the atmosphere of the class. These not only meet students’ need,especially the students with lower English proficiency level.Though code-switching is not a new language phenomenon, but this essay is from thepoint of view of the adaptation theory to study the pragmatic functions of code-switching ofEnglish teachers in language class and code-switching has the most obvious influence overwhich links of students’ learning, which the author believes few people have ever researched.Briefly, mother tongue as a medium in language teaching plays an important part. Theauthor hopes this essay will be helpful for vocational college English teaching and hope it canaccelerate and contribute to vocational college language teaching.