Teachers’ Code Switching Used by Indonesian Lecturers in EFL Classrooms

Abstract

The aim of this study is to know the types and the functions of code switching employed by the lecturers in EFL classrooms. Two English lecturers of Universitas Muhammadiyah Semarang, Indonesia, took part in this study while one lecturer from Universitas Negeri Semarang as its supervisor. The participants were chosen purposively. Data were collected through classroom observation, videorecordings, and interview with both lecturers. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis show that the lecturers employed code switching as proposed by Poplack (1980) comprised inter-sentential code switching (44.7%), intra-sentential code switching (44.7%), and extra-sentential code switching/tag switching (10.5%). The lecturers employed code switching to help the students in understanding the lecturers' explanation, requesting help, and clearing misunderstanding. The use of code switching was believed that it helped the lecturers and the students to create the communication effectively in the classroom.

Speaking Performance and the Types of Code-switching of Senior High School Students

“…Therefore, the L2 learners must think of the correct use of grammatical constructions of the language to have the correct structure of the sentence. In this case, L1 employed inter-sentential code-switching was fewer (Purwanto & Aimah, 2018).…”

“…The study implies as students used intra-sentential code-switching, it is a bilingual speaker's skill, not a disadvantage (Abad, 2010). As Valerio (2015) emphasized that the combination of the international language with the vernacular becomes a habitual practice among Filipinos both in rural and urban scenarios and for explaining the complicated words, code-switching could not be avoided (Purwanto & Aimah, 2018).…”

“…Jalil (2009) said that inserting tags does not provide so much contribution to the conversation, because tag code-switching is effortless and does not involve a high command of both languages. It is the insertion of the first language or the tag and exclamation in the second language utterance (Novianti, 2013) without violating any grammatical rules (Purwanto & Aimah, 2018). These tags did not serve any special educational functions.…”

“…According to Al-Qaysi (2016), tags contain grammatical limitations because it is effortlessly presented at different points in a monolingual speech without violating syntactic rules. So, using tag code-switching implies that students need time to think the best words or vocabulary to fill in their utterances, without syntactic constraints (Purwanto & Aimah, 2018). That is why they frequently used intra-sentential code-switching because of more vocabularies learned from reading.…”

“…Since inter-sentential is characterized by a switch from one language variety to another outside the sentence or the clause level of second language utterance (Koban, 2013; Al Heeti & Al Abdely, 2016). Also, it is less used in the conversation because the sentence structure may be bewildering for the students (Purwanto & Aimah, 2018). According to Al Heeti and Al Abdely (2016), inter-sentential codeswitching requires grammatical, morphological, and textual knowledge in both languages.…”