Can Differential Processing of L2 Vocabulary Inform the Debate on Teacher Code-Switching Behaviour? The Case of Chinese Learners of English

Abstract

For a number of years second language acquisition researchers at the University of Oxford have been concerned with establishing ‘optimal’ (or ‘principled’) first language (L1) use by teachers in the second language (L2) classroom. This research is set against a background of a growing international interest in code-switching behaviour in second language classrooms in general and the extent to which this behaviour reflects, or is similar to, the well-documented code-switching behaviour in naturalistic environments. The latter type of code-switching occurs in non-instructed contexts where bilinguals, in a single conversation, communicate by using more than one language or dialect. Much of teacher code-switching behaviour appears to centre around unfamiliar or unknown L2 lexical items (Canagarajah, 1995). Although naturalistic code-switching encompasses far more than lexical switches, lexical items which are communicated in the ‘embedded language’ (Myers-Scotton, 1993), for a variety of reasons, are a strong feature of the switching patterns of bilinguals (Muysken, 2000).