An Empirical Study On Effective Application Of Code-switching As A Pedagogical Strategy In College English Teaching

Code-switching is the alternate use of two or more languages in the same utterance or conversation. Since the advent of the foreign language teaching strategy in the1960s, there hasn’t been an unanimous agreement on the use of mother language in foreign language teaching class. Linguists and teachers who advocate target language-only teaching strategy believe that code-switching will hinder foreign language teaching, while supporters of code-switching are in favor that in-time and proper code-switching can improve the quality of foreign language teaching. This thesis is aimed at exploring the necessity of code-switching in college English class from the pragmatic point of view.Based on Verschueren’s adaptation theory and Yu Guodong’s adaptation model, and through a systematic empirical research, the thesis attempts to analyze the current occurrence of code-switching in college English teaching, and focus particularly on adaptability of it.Quantitative and qualitative research methods are used in the present study to investigate the status quo of code-switching by8English teachers at North China Electric Power University in their non-English major classes. The data mainly come from three channels:classroom observation, students’ questionnaires and teachers’ interviews, among which class observation is the most important. The source comes from the performance of eight English teachers and their eight correspondent non-English major freshmen classes, including twelve majors of both Arts and Sciences. The observation time sums up to3200minutes, about640minutes for each teacher.275students’ questionnaires are valid among the278distributed ones. And the subjects of teachers’ interview are the above-mentioned eight teachers.The thesis draws the conclusion from the data collected that the reasons why teachers in college English class apply code-switching are to make adaptation. To be more specific, it is for adaptation to linguistic reality in order to avoid lexical gap; to social conventions to avoid embarrassment; to psychological motivations to better mobilize the classroom teaching and learning environment, which is the most important and common reason; and to teacher’s personal teaching concepts to meet the teacher’s personal requirements of the amount of first language and second language used in English teaching. These four reasons are never clear-cut, instead, they overlap in most cases.Besides, the study also finds out that code-switching is common and indispensable in college English teaching. However, sometimes teachers use code-switching without self-conscientiousness and self-supervision in class, which may result in unscientific use of code-switching in foreign language teaching.The present study has important practical implications for English teachers:teachers are advised to reflect on their teaching process, and use code-switching as an effective teaching strategy; at the same time, they should improve their consciousness when they apply code-switching, and conduct code-switching consciously and purposefully in accordance with the needs of teaching and from students.As the chosen topic in this research is relatively difficult and involves a broad view of the sampling, data collection and other limitations, many problems need further studying.