Teaching in two languages: The pedagogical value of code-switching in multilingual classroom settings

Abstract

This chapter explores the use of code-switching (CS) by a bilingual teacher in a South African school. It scrutinizes instances of switches from English to Xhosa by a teacher as she interacts with her learners. It also seeks to find out whether her communicative repertoire has any pedagogical value or is more an expression of her dual identity. One of the noted features of her discourse is that she uses CS to alleviate the effects of the differences between the learners’ home background and the unfamiliar linguistic demands of the school. This chapter concludes by pointing out that CS can be harnessed as a learning and communicative resource in classroom situations.