“What’s pavement? — Chodník.”
“What’s pavement? — Chodník.”

Code-switching in Upper-Secondary EFL Classrooms

Summary/Abstract: The role of the mother tongue in English language teaching has always been a contentious issue. English teachers, prospective teachers, teacher educators, language learners and researchers in the field are divided into two opposing factions over the matter. One advocates for the occasional use of the mother tongue because it has its role and significance in a language classroom, the other promotes the idea of English-only classrooms. That is why this study focuses on code-switching (i.e. the participants’ alternation from English into Czech or vice versa) in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms. Since code-switching serves many functions in EFL classrooms, the goal of this conversation-analytic study is to provide insight into how teachers and students code-switch while dealing with word meaning. The data consists of 13 hours and 30 minutes of recordings from five different upper-secondary schools in the Czech Republic. In each school, three to five consecutive English language lessons were recorded in the final year. All students and their teachers spoke Czech, therefore Czech could be used to explain word meanings and everybody would understand. The analysis shows that Czech is commonly used in EFL classes to deal with word meaning, even though the teacher maximizes the use of the target language and uses English as the main language in the classroom. It also demonstrates how teachers’ questions may influence students’ language choice in their answers. The study thus reveals the intricacies of language choice and language use in foreign language classrooms.

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