A Study On Teacher-student Attitudes Towards Teachers' Code-switching In College English Classroom

Classroom Code-switching(CS)is a sophisticated language phenomenon,which is not only similar to the code-switching in bilingual society,but has unique characteristics.For a long time,there is a hot debate on whether the CS should be used in classroom in the academic field at home and abroad.The opponents hold that CS in EFL classrooms will hinder students' TL acquisition.While,most studies show that timely and appropriately use of CS can facilitate TL teaching and learning in class.As the present studies on CS mainly focused on its main types,functions,and attitude,but only a few has done researches on both teachers' and students' attitudes to the use of CS and tried to make comparisons between them.Based on the previous researches in the frequency,functions and reasons of using CS in classrooms,firstly,this study has chosen 20 college English teachers and 100 first-year university students who are majoring in international trade from Hunan University(HNU)and Hunan University of Finance and Economics(HNUFE)respectively as the research subjects,and then used the questionnaires to do surveys on them.The study is aimed to know the attitudes of teachers and students to the frequency,functions and reasons of using CS in college English classrooms and to see if there is any discrepancy between them.Meanwhile,it is also targeted to find if there is any discrepancy between the teacher-student attitudes in two different level universities.In addition,the study has also used the interview to explore the reasons why the discrepancies exist for providing feasible advice for teachers to use CS in college English class more effectively.Through the collection and analysis of the data form questionnaires,it can draw the following conclusions:Firstly,in general,teachers and students both hold positive attitudes to the use of CS in college English classrooms,and they all agree that timely and appropriately use of CS can contribute to English teaching and learning.Secondly,the study finds that there exist great discrepancies between teachers' and students' attitudes to the use of CS in class.As taking on different considerations,teachers advocate maximally use of target language in class,and their perceptions on the functions of using CS are mostly focusing on the subject access and language ability dimensions.While,compared with teachers,students tend to support their teachers to use CS in class more frequently,especially when explaining the content of the text.In addition,besides the functions in subject access and language ability,their perceptions to it are inclined to the classroom management and psychological motivations dimensions.What's more,there also exists discrepancy between teachers and students in the reasons of using CS.Thirdly,there exists no big significance between the attitudes of teachers who are in HNU and HNUFE.Even though there exists discrepancy between students in several specific items in the survey,generally speaking,their attitudes also do not vary a lot.To some extent,this study can contribute to future researches on the attitudes towards teacher's use of CS,and provide some suggestions for college English teachers.Finally,as the author lacks of research experiences,there are also some limitations in this study.