AnAdaptation-Based Study On Teachers’Code-switching In EFL Classrooms Of The Urban And Rural Junior Middle Schools

Code-switching has become a hot topic in the fields of linguistics and appliedlinguistics. It attracts many scholars’ attention from various perspectives in recentyears. Code-switching is a common linguistic phenomenon in foreign languageclassrooms. A large number of studies (Ibrahim,&Shah,&Armia,2013; Macaro,2001; Wang&Kirkpatrick,2012; Moodley,2007; Sampson,2012; üstünel&Seedhouse,2005; Li&Wu,2009; Willans,2011; Chen,2004; Gao&Dai,2007; Xie,2011; Yang,&Cui,&Ren,2012) on code-switching have been conducted in thespecific classroom contexts.This thesis investigates teachers’ code-switching in both urban and rural juniormiddle schools from a pragmatic perspective. It attempts to find out the features,reasons and functions of teachers’ code-switching as well as the students’ attitudestowards it, focusing on ten EFL classes of five teachers from two junior middleschools. This empirical study employed the quantitative research of the students’questionnaires and the transcripts, and then the qualitative investigation of theteachers’ interviews and some examples in the transcripts. Based on Verschueren’sLinguistic Adaptation Theory (LAT)(1999) and Yu Guodong’s Linguistic AdaptationModel (LAM)(2001), this study proposes that the teachers utilize code-switching asadaptation to the linguistic reality, the teacher’s role, the psychological motivations,the students’ ability, and the teaching particularity.Through the analysis of the collected data, it can be found that most of theteachers and students hold a positive attitude towards teachers’ code-switching in EFLclasses. However, it also indicates that code-switching is somewhat overused by theteachers, especially those in the countryside. In EFL classrooms, they tend to use moreChinese to teach than the teachers in town because of the gap between their differentteaching environments. What’s more, this study verifies that teachers’ code-switchingplays an important part in EFL classrooms, especially for those junior middle school students who are still not proficient in English, and it can be used as a teachingstrategy to fulfill a variety of communicative and teaching goals.