This study explores the oral interaction between teachers and their students in university English as a foreign language classrooms in Mainland China with particular focus on teachers' codeswitching behaviours and students' reactions to these behaviours. Codeswitching in foreign or second language classrooms has been the subject of a great deal of research interest from the applied linguistics community in recent years, but patterns of codeswitching in "broadly communicative" classrooms have rarely been studied in great detail nor have students' strategic reactions to codeswitching been directly elicited from learners as a means of gauging the impact of teacher codeswitching. Moreover, there is a clear need to situate the debate about teacher codeswitching in a more rigorous theoretical framework. A case study approach best suited the aims of this research and two teachers were selected in an initial pha e (Phase 1) of the study because they conformed to a number of pedagogical and interaction-related criteria. In the main phase of the study data were elicited through a combination of systematic observation, stimulated recalls and teacher interviews. The codeswitching patterns of the two teachers were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. However, much greater emphasis is placed on the qualitative analysis of the codeswitching and students' reactions towards it. The findings show that the amount of codeswitching was relatively low but varied considerably by lesson. Most codeswitching was for medium-oriented lexical explanations. Students' reactions to their teachers' codeswitching varied by individual not by groups. The findings suggest an interesting pattern of variance between the two teachers in terms of their codeswitching behaviours and enrich our understanding of codeswitching in L2 classrooms and provide hypotheses that could be tested with larger samples. The findings also contribute to an understanding of the functions and consequences of codeswitching from the learners' perspective, which may contribute towards major advances in the field and have direct pedagogical implications.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bl.uk/oai:ethos.bl.uk:493659 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Guo, Tao |
| Contributors | Macaro, Ernesto |
| Publisher | University of Oxford |
| Source Sets | Ethos UK |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Source | http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:21bca6e1-95ee-446c-9932-1416e7999e9e |
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