Codeswitching in Swedish ESL Teaching

Abstract: Many studies have shown that use of the target language second and/ or foreign language (in this case English) teaching has greatly improved students' learning, albeit, not all teachers use the target language exclusively but rather switch between the first and target language. This particular study has shown that the teacher in compulsory school does alternate between the target language and the first language for various reasons, while teachers in upper secondary school exclusively use the target language both within and outside the classroom and there are rarely any occurrences of codeswitching among students and teachers. The reasons for this are, because the content which has been taught has been too difficult for the students to understand, or the students have refused to interact in English with both their teacher and fellow students. The teachers' view on the matter tells us that even though they have tried to exclusively use the target language in the English classroom, it has not been working in the manner they wanted it to have. In order to gather data for this research, seven classroom observations have been carried out and to complement them interviews with three teachers have been conducted to get their view on the use of English in their own teaching and why they think codeswitching occurs among students and themselves.