The Effects Of English Teachers’ Code-switching On Senior High School Students’ English Achievements

Code-switching has been researched since the1960s and1970s.Code-switching in classrooms means the constant alternation betweentwo languages in foreign language teaching classes. However, a surveyon literature shows there are few studies of code-switching in Englishclassrooms in senior high schools, and this leads to a lack of scientifictheoretical guidance for high school English teachers’ classroomcode-switching. Therefore, studying of code-switching in Englishclassrooms in senior high schools can help us know the current situationof senior high school English teachers’ code-switching and the effects ofteachers’ code-switching on students’ achievements, so as to provide atheoretical guidance for teachers’ classroom code-switching.The present study intends to give answers to the following questions:1. What is the current situation of teachers’ code-switching in class?2. What are the reasons for code-switching?3. Does English and Chinese code-switching frequency have anyeffects on students’ achievements?The main subjects of this study were four teachers and their studentsof the high school affiliated to Inner Mongolia Normal University, andthree methods of classroom observation, questionnaire and experimentwere used. The researcher used classroom observation and digitalrecorder to analyze the proportion of teachers’ classroom code-switching,and used questionnaire to explore the reasons for high school teachers’classroom code-switching, and used two and a half months experiment tofind out the effects of teachers’ classroom code-switching on students’achievements. From the research results we can see, teachers’ classroomcode-switching is a common phenomenon in senior high school, but thefrequency of different teachers’ classroom code-switching is different, and the main reason for this situation is students’ English level. Thereason for teachers classroom code-switching mainly include thestudent’s English foundation, the needs of different curriculum, nocorresponding translation, and language defects of teachers and students.The experimental data show that the use of English has effects onstudents’ achievements to a certain degree, but the data also show thatthere is no significant difference between these four classes after two anda half months. However, all these cannot prove that the use of targetlanguage has a negative effect on students’ achievements in secondlanguage classroom teaching. So, the researcher thinks it is necessary touse target language appropriately during the classroom teaching. At theend of this thesis, the researcher puts forward some suggestions forfurther research and points out the limitations of this study.