Comparing The Effects Of Code-Switching With English-Only Explanations On The Vocabulary Acquisition In A Senior Middle School English Reading Class

The debate on whether the L1 of the learners should be used in the foreign language classroom or whether teachers should use the L2 exclusively in the foreign language classroom has been controversial in the field of foreign language acquisition. Therefore, teacher code-switching in English classroom has attracted many researchers’ attention at home and abroad. According to this debate, the present study applies empirical research method to compare the effects of teacher code-switching with English-only explanations on the vocabulary acquisition in a senior middle school reading class. In this study, teacher code-switching refers to the alternation between English and Chinese when teacher explains new target words in senior middle school English classroom.Based on the review of related researches and theories of Input Hypothesis, Interactive Hypothesis and Noticing Hypothesis, research questions of the present study are put forward as follows: 1) Is students’ retention of vocabulary acquisition better facilitated by a teacher’s use of code-switching or by providing English-only explanations in the immediate test? 2) Is students’ retention of vocabulary acquisition target words better facilitated by a teacher’s use of code-switching or by providing English-only explanations in the delayed test?One hundred and eight students coming from two intact classes of Grade 3 in senior middle school are chosen as research participants. They are randomly assigned to English-only class consisting of 56 participants and code-switching class consisting of 52 participants. The teacher presents ten target words in a reading class, which are explained in English only and code-switching respectively in two classes. After presenting these ten target words, the teacher asks students to take an immediate test. Two weeks later, a delay test of the same content is carried out. The test paper which aims to test students’ acquisition and retention of vocabulary knowledge consists of degree of familiarity with target words, meaning and sentence making. VKS is employed as a scale of scoring in this study.This experiment adopts SPSS16.0 software to analyze data, and its results are presented as follows: 1)Students’ retention of vocabulary acquisition is better facilitated by code-switching explanations in the immediate test. 2) Students’ retention of vocabulary acquisition is better facilitated by code-switching explanations in the delayed test. To put them in more detail, students in code-switching class are more familiar with the form of the target words and have a better understanding of target words’ meaning while students in English-only class make better sentences using target words in immediate and delayed test. One interesting phenomenon is that students’ vocabulary retention in code-switching class slips in delayed test while students’ vocabulary retention in English-only class improves slightly in delayed test, which may be interpreted as English-only explanations will have slow and far-reaching effects. In addition, this research implies that code-switching explanations to target words can be effective to low-intermediate students if teachers use it timely and properly.