A Comparative Study Of Chinese-English Code-switching Between Novice Teachers And Expert Teachers In Senior High School English Class

As one of the outcomes of language contact,code-switching is a common phenomenon in people's daily life.Since the 1960 s,many experts have paid attention to the code-switching in many fields,such as linguistics,psychology,sociology,pedagogy and so on.Beginning in the 1970 s,studies on foreign language classroom code-switching has obtained abundant achievements.Classroom code-switching refers to the alternations between Chinese and English in foreign language teaching class.Many scholars had heated discussions about whether the mother tongue should be used in the foreign language classroom.In recent years,a large number of domestic and foreign research findings show that in order to make sure the classroom teaching smoothly,most language teachers tend to use native language in the teaching process.Therefore,code-switching is a kind of effective teaching strategies and methods.This study is based on the typology of code-switching model of Poplack,Myers-Scotton's matrix language framework model and Rolin-Ianziti and Brownlie's functions model of teachers' code-switching.This paper mainly studies three questions: 1.What are the similarities and differences between the novice teachers' and expert teachers' code-switching types in a senior high school English class? 2.What are the similarities and differences between the novice teachers' and expert teachers' code-switching functions in a senior high school English class? 3.What are the main factors which influence the novice teachers' and expert teachers' code-switching? In this paper,a corpus-based approach combining with qualitative and quantitative method is used,and the teacher interview is used to verify the research.This study shows that in the use of classroom code-switching,there are both similarities and certain differences between the two kinds of teachers,the major findings are as follows:(1)From the code-switching types,the novice teachers use the intra-sentential code-switching more frequently than the expert teachers while the expert teachers give priority to inter-sentential switching.(2)From the perspective of the code-switching functions,the two kinds of teachers all mainly employ the teaching functions while the communicative functions as the miscellaneous functions.Both the two kinds of teachers use the elaboration and repetition teaching functions frequently.And from the aspect of communicative functions,they more use code-switching to make classroom management.(3)Although code-switching is prevalent in classroom discourse of two types of teachers,the amount of English use of expert teachers in the classroom is more than that of novice teachers.(4)The main factors that influence the teachers' code-switching include the following aspects: the students' English ability and cognitive style,theteachers' language proficiency and teaching experience,the teaching content and the classroom size.In English classes,code-switching is a common phenomenon,and as an important teaching strategy,code-switching can help students understand and master the content more easily and efficiently.However,when using code-switching teachers should ensure to give the priority to the target language,meanwhile,code-switching should be used timely and limitedly in classroom teaching in order that code-switching really becomes a kind of teaching strategy and it can be applied in English classroom teaching.What's more,the novice teachers should learn from the expert teachers and they should try to improve their English teaching ability and English language proficiency in order to promote the students' second language acquisition as well as improve their English ability.