English-Swedish Code-switching in EFL Classroom: Discourse Resource & Mechanism

Abstract

This paper reports the results of an empirical study to discover different kinds of code-switching in the discourse of high school adult students in EFL classroom in Sweden. It investigates also the functions of code-switching practiced by the learners of English. The participants in this work are 26 adult students of second level English(6 male and 20 female) and their teacher. All the students are non-Swede and most of them come with various cultural and linguistic backgrounds from 12 different countries such as Iraq, Turkey, Iran, Poland, Greece, Somalia, Romania, Eritrea, Syria, Lithuania, Azerbaijan. They study English as a foreign language and Swedish is their second language. They practice English-Swedish code-switching in the classroom when they speak English with the teacher or with one another.The study depends on descriptive discourse analysis methodology. The researcher uses video recording to capture any possible code-switching in the learners ´ speech. The recorded speech of learners of English is encoded into special labelling with detailed transcription in the process of data analysis. The analysis linguistically focuses on the use of code-switching and the main findings of this work are the following :1. In the eighteen extracts of learners ´conversations containing code-switching, adjectives appeared to be the largest majority of code-switching occurrences. There are more than 7 cases of Swedish adjective code-switching.2. The English-Swedish code-switching indicates the development of the learners ´ language production.3. The English-Swedish code-switching occurs naturally and smoothly for the class discourse is spontaneous and code-switching is not accompanied by any kind of hesitation and not preceded by long pauses.4. Swedish versus English choices are considered as a functional resource of individual preference which may indicate proficiency because the meaning can be explained in the interaction.5. The occurrences of code-switching in the learners ´ utterances highlight the values code-switching may have as a communicative resource in the multilingual interaction.