EFL Teachers’ Code-switching Between English And Chinese In English Classroom Of Rural Senior High Schools

Code-switching can be basically defined by using two or more languages alternately during one utterance or conversation. As for the central issue of whether code-switching should exist in the EFL/ESL classrooms and whether it can be promoted as one of the effective teaching strategies, different scholars in China and abroad hold completely different views. Deeply influenced by the audio-lingual method and the communicative language teaching, numerous scholars advocate that the exposure of the target language in classroom should be as much as possible, so the native language should be avoided most of the time for fear that it deprive the valuable input of the target language. In recent years, with the development of sociolinguistics and applied linguistics, an increasing number of scholars have conducted investigation and study with regard to the question of which language should be used to teaching in the EFL classrooms. And find that code-switching is a rather common phenomenon which teachers often adopt as a useful teaching strategy. In view of the subject of most previous studies and researches upon code-switching are EFL teachers in college, universities or city senior high schools, this study attempts to take the EFL teachers from rural senior high school as the major subject. The specific research questions are listed as follows:1. What is the general situation of EFL teachers’ code-switching in rural senior high school classrooms?2. What factors influence the EFL teachers’ code-switching and what are the teachers’ and students’ attitude to code-switching?3. What are the functions of Chinese code in teaching English?The linguistic data of the study come from two ways: the EFL teachers’ classroom audio-recordings and the questionnaires of teachers and students. The audio-recordings are the major source of the collected data, which are selectively transcribed into written texts to profoundly exploring the function of teachers’ code-switching in EFL classrooms. The questionnaires of teachers and students are mainly used to find out what their attitude to code-switching is and what the factors they consider that have great influence on the use of code-switching are.According to the analysis of data, the author puts forward the following conclusions: 1. English teachers’ code-switching widely exists in the rural senior high school EFL classroom. Furthermore, to some extent, Chinese code is overused in the researched rural senior high school. 2. There are many factors that influence on the use of code-switching, among which the students’ English proficiency and cognitive ability are considered as the major ones. What’s more, a majority of the teachers and students are inclined to hold a positive attitude toward it. 3. Chinese code has four functions of translation, meta-language, communication and expression. Therefore, code-switching is often considered as an effective teaching strategy to facilitate the students’ English learning.