A Study Of Teacher Code-Switching In EFL Classrooms In Mongolian Senior High School

Code-switching refers to two or more kinds of language varieties within one sentence. In the past 20 years, code-switching in foreign language classroom has become the research focus of scholars at home and abroad in bilingual environment. Its vigorous development provides plenty of theoretical basis and references to the study of code-switching in trilingual classroom. Given this, the author chooses "A Study of Teacher Code-Switching in EFL Classrooms in Mongolian Senior High School" as research topic to find out the distributional features of form, structure and function of code-switching in EFL Classrooms in Mongolian Senior High School, and to explore the teaching function and causal factors of code-switching in such teaching context, which provide effective suggestions for teacher code-switching research in foreign language oreven multilingual teaching conditions.The research subjects of present study are four English teachers, each with two classes recorded, in Hohhot Mongolian School. Based on the transcription of eight class videotapes, both quantitative and qualitative analyses are adopted to describe statistically. In addition, the four teachers are interviewed deeply in terms of classroom code-switching phenomenon to illustrate the causal factors of language selection and code switching. Classroom discourse analysis and Socio-cultural theory are applied as the theoretical framework in this study. The author picks several important theories in Socio-cultural theory to analyze the data, namely, mediation, scaffolding and internalization, and analyzes the mediation function of teacher code-switching during English teaching.Poplack's (1980) three types of code-switching:intra-sentential code-switching, inter-sentential code-switching and tag switching, together with WuBaiyinna's (2016) teaching functions are applied to depict the distributional features of structures and functions of code-switching. Result shows (1) Mongolian-English switching is higher than Chinese-English switching in frequency; inter-sentential code-switching is slightly higher than intra-sentential code-switching, and tag switching is the lowest in frequency. To be specific, there are significant differences in the frequencies of code-switching between teachers. (2) The frequencies of teaching functions of code-switching shows helping to accomplish teaching tasks is slightly higher than managing classroom. The paper analyzes functions from the perspective of two levels and five kinds of classroom teaching function, in which instruction or clarification task takes the largest amount of percentage, which proves excessive use of mother tongue exists. (3)The main causal factors that affect teachers' code-switching include English level, educational background, teaching aims, affective factors and teaching time. Generally speaking, teachers use a large amount of Mongolian and a small amount of Chinese code in senior high English classrooms in Hohhot Mongolian School. That is to say, Mongolian plays dominant role and Chinese plays assistant role in English classrooms.Based on the research results, the author believes that first of all, English teachers in senior high classrooms in Hohhot Mongolian School should enhance the understanding of code-switching, adopt code-switching with clear intention, consciousness and control, so as to offer students with scaffolding assistance according to particular teaching situation. As English teachers switch codes in class, they should use mother tongue as much as possible to make full use of the mediation function of Mongolian. In accordance with the reaction and demand of students, teachers should adjust the codes in time so that code-switching is used as teaching strategy in English classroom teaching.