Code-Switching in the Upper Secondary School EFL Classroom in Sweden

Code-switching has been shown to be beneficial for students’ language learning and for strengthening their identities. Despite this, it can be interpreted that code-switching is not encouraged in the syllabus for English in upper secondary school in Sweden. Because of this potential disagreement, this study aims to broaden the knowledge of how upper secondary school teachers relate to code-switching in their different classrooms. Thereby, this study seeks to examine some upper secondary school EFL teachers’ understanding of code-switching as well as the use of code-switching in their different classrooms. In this qualitative study, four upper secondary school teachers of English participated in semi-structured interviews followed by classroom observations. The teachers represent all courses of English at upper secondary school level and they represent schools with different programs and students with different first languages. The results show that the teachers have limited knowledge of code-switching and that they believe that a large amount of target language use in the classroom is favorable. Nevertheless, the results also show that the teachers as well as their students use codeswitching both intentionally and unintentionally for various purposes, but none of the participating teachers seem to use code-switching as a strategy to promote long-standing language acquisition. However, the results indicate that the teachers seem to effectively adapt their code-switching behavior to their student group. The findings of this study are in line with earlier research where it, for instance, is argued that code-switching is more suitable for classes with students with lower language proficiency