A study of teachers’ code-switching in six Swedish EFL classrooms

The purpose of this degree paper is to investigate when and why teachers code-switch between L1 and L2 in the L2 classroom, and what the teachers’ thoughts about codeswitching are. To get the information that we need to reach our purpose we have done classroom observations and interviewed teachers. The study was performed at a compulsory school and an upper secondary school, where we managed to get the co-operation from three teachers at each school. The main conclusions are that all teachers at the compulsory school code-switched when they translated difficult words and phrases when they were too hard for the students to understand. Two of the teachers at the compulsory school used code-switching when they wanted to get the students’ attention or create order in the classroom. Two of the teachers at the upper secondary school code-switched when expressing feelings for example irritation. All three teachers at the upper secondary school believe that code-switching is a helpful instrument when teaching English and is considered to be inevitable