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

Sammanfattning: Code-switching has been shown to be beneficial for students’ language learning and forstrengthening their identities. Despite this, it can be interpreted that code-switching isnot encouraged in the syllabus for English in upper secondary school in Sweden.Because of this potential disagreement, this study aims to broaden the knowledge ofhow upper secondary school teachers relate to code-switching in their differentclassrooms. Thereby, this study seeks to examine some upper secondary school EFLteachers’ understanding of code-switching as well as the use of code-switching in theirdifferent classrooms. In this qualitative study, four upper secondary school teachers ofEnglish participated in semi-structured interviews followed by classroom observations.The teachers represent all courses of English at upper secondary school level and theyrepresent schools with different programs and students with different first languages.The results show that the teachers have limited knowledge of code-switching and thatthey 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 codeswitchingboth intentionally and unintentionally for various purposes, but none of theparticipating teachers seem to use code-switching as a strategy to promote long-standinglanguage acquisition. However, the results indicate that the teachers seem to effectivelyadapt their code-switching behavior to their student group. The findings of this studyare in line with earlier research where it, for instance, is argued that code-switching ismore suitable for classes with students with lower language proficiency.