A Case Study Of Teachers’ Code-switching In College Reading Course Of Non-english Majors From The View Of Sociocultural Theory

The focus of the study is on identifying the functions of code-switching, that is,how the teachers use code-switching as a teaching strategy to facilitate teaching andlearning. The data were analyzed by applying several key principles within theframework of sociocultural theory.Lately, considerable progress has been made in the research of the codeswitching from the perspective of pragmatics and cognition. However, it is rare to seethat this domain to be researched from the social cultural theory. As a result of this,the initial question that motivated our study was to determine whether the theory canbe used to explain this phenomenon. As from the different perspective to explore thesame problem often leads to different conclusions, this study would try to provide abridge between the distinct research traditions of bilingual language and social culturestudies of code switching, which will allow us to explore the richness of this study byinvesting the dynamics of code switching its cognitive, neural and individualdifference.To find out the role of the mother tongue in the class of English teachers, theauthor chooses three teachers from Taiyuan University of Technology to conduct an empirical study, and tried to use the social-cultural theory to analyze the role of themother tongue in the class of English teachers. The author adopted several importantterms of socio-cultural theory, namely: interlanguage, scientific concepts andprinciples of scaffolding, to analyze the role of code-switching in English teaching.Through classroom recording and corpus transliteration, observations, class notes andother research methods, the research tried to explore the general situation ofcode-switching in the chosen English classes.The results of this case study indicates that Chinese were still quite extensivelyadopted in English classes. All the occurrence of teacher code-switching can be putinto the categorization of inter-sentential code-switching, intra-sententialcode-switching and tag switching. The functions of Code-switching are as following:first of all, code switching is the scaffolded assistance of students’ problem-solvingtasks; what’s more, it is the mediation of teaching and students’ learning; last but notleast, it takes the role of an activator from everyday concepts to scientific concepts.Based on the findings from the present study and on comparisons with thefindings in previous studies, this paper concludes that the role of the mother tongueshould not be restricted to supportion, facilitatation and compensatory in FLclassrooms, and that both too much reliance and total prohibition of the mother tongueshould be avoided.