A Study Of Teachers’ Code-Switching In Grade Ten EFL Classroom

Code-switching refers to speakers’alternate use of two or more languages or varieties of language in one utterance or conversation. As one of the results of language contact, code-switching is a common phenomenon in people’s daily life. Many academic fields, like sociology, psychology, anthropology, linguistics and pedagogy, have studied it from the 1950s. Influenced by the audio-lingual method and the communicative approach, many scholars think the mother tongue, which has been considered as an obstacle to the input of the target language, deprived students’ valuable right of being exposed in the target language environment as much as possible. However, many studies have shown that code-switching between the mother tongue and the target language is a common phenomenon in language teaching class. And research also shows that if used properly, code-switching is also a teaching strategy in foreign language class. This thesis tries to answer the following four questions (1) What are the students’ and teachers’ attitudes towards classroom code-switching? (2) Is there any code-switching difference between different lesson types or different language teachers? (3) What functions does classroom code-switching have? (4) What conditions should English teachers follow when they are conducting code-switching?This research investigates teachers’ code-switching by questionnaires, classroom observation, and interview. The research participants are the Grade Ten teachers and students in a Tianjin key high school.According to the data analysis and discussion, the author concludes: 1.Code-switching is a common phenomenon in Grade Ten English class in senior high school and most students and teachers has an approval attitude towards it.2. Classroom code-switching is affected by lesson types and teachers’teaching style.3. code-switching has adaptability functions and teaching functions.4. The conditions apt for language teachers’code-switching in EFL classes. Lastly, this research also finds that Chinese is overused and unconsciously used in English class. Considering this problem, the author gives her own suggestions.