A Study Of Teacher's Code-switching In Senior High EFL Classrooms Based On The Scaffolding Theory

With language teaching increasingly turning into the post-method era,code-switching, which has long been observed in foreign language teaching, a once-ignored phenomenon, nowadays has attracted researchers' attention once again.Code-switching refers to a phenomenon that the two speakers alternately use two or more language varieties during a utterance or a conversation.Teacher's code-switching between the first language and the target language(TL) in the FL(foreign language) classroom is a main issue that has been disputed by scholars. After deeply and widely probing the foreign language classroom, more and more scholars find that foreign language teacher's code-switching is a common phenomenon, and it's even regarded as an effective teaching strategy. Since 1960,many researchers have used many different methods to analyze the code-switching on account of grammar,psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, and pragmatics. However, there are few researchers to study teacher code-switching from the perspective of scaffolding theory. This paper tries to explore this phenomenon in the English language classrooms at a senior high school in Chifeng city from the newperspective.In order to find out the basic usage of mother tongue in English classrooms, the author investigated six classes and 6 teachers at the chosen school by resorting to the classroom recording, student questionnaire and teacher interview. The specific questions are: 1) What is happening to teacher's code-switching in the chosen senior high school English classrooms,involving frequency, type and function? 2)How do teachers provide scaffolded help for students through code-switching within the zone of proximal development? This study focus on the functions of code-switching,in other words, how the teachers employ Chinese to adjust their teaching and students' learning, take the code-switching as a mediation tool, build a bridge,provide scaffolded help for students. This paper analyzed the data according to several key concepts of sociocultural theory.The results of this paper revealed that Chinese was widely used by the teachers in English classes. The occurrence of teacher code-switching can be divided into three types, namely, inter-sentential code-switching,intra-sentential code-switching and tag switching. They were mainly employed for teaching purposes, but also for metalinguistic functions and communicative functions. The result of questionnaire and interview showed that both the teachers and the students hold a positive attitude toward the teacher code-switching. They all thought that the mother tongue should be used to translate or learn vocabulary and grammar, but their opinions weredissimilar for some other purposes on the use of the mother tongue.According to the present study and previous studies, this thesis concludes that the role of the mother tongue should be employed appropriately in foreign language classrooms, and to avoid excessive reliance on it or prohibition of using it.