After working around the world for 10 years as an EFL teacher, Kari Stunell settled in France where she currently works in teacher education at the Université de Bordeaux in France. She teaches EFL, language teaching pedagogy, and didactics. Email: kari.stunell@u-bordeaux.fr

I spend quite a lot of time teaching English to Masters’ students who didn’t choose to study English! At least not at this particular moment in their lives. The groups tend to be mixed level, and the focus for the students is on other aspects of their studies, so studying English can be viewed as a burden. Nonetheless, for many of them a solid B2 level, especially in spoken English, probably will help them once they find themselves on the job market, so I always feel like it’s a pity to waste the opportunity.

However, getting students to use the target language during autonomous groupwork, can seem like an uphill struggle. With every new group, I take time to explain that I consider doing things in English, however long it takes, to be more important than finishing the activity, or having the right answers. Nevertheless, I’m still sometimes left with the impression that the only time the students speak English is when they know I’m listening, like a kind of cat and mouse game! As I approach a group, the discussion switches into English, and as I move away the discussion drifts back into French – the L1 of the majority of the students.

Of course, many influences are at work during autonomous group work [1] especially with mixed level groups; worries about being judged, feelings of not being as good as the others, peer pressure, going with the majority language flow, not daring to stick one’s neck out and prioritise the target language against the odds, wanting to help, to ensure being understood, not to mention the long-term influence of the results-oriented French school system. It’s not surprising, therefore, to hear a lot of code-switching going on during this kind of activity.

Translanguaging and code-switching amongst plurilingual speakers has been much researched in recent years, and is now commonly viewed by the scientific community, as a natural, normal, intelligent way for a person to use their language repertoire [2]. Outside the classroom, people who share more than one language tend to speak using a mixture of the two (or three, or four!); because some things are easier to express in one language than in another, some topics are more habitually discussed in one language than another, or simply for fun, because playing with language and languages is a good way to make jokes and create humour.

So, this year I decided it was time to explore the question in the classroom with my students. I was interested in knowing whether or not being more aware of their own code-switching habits could help them to become more efficient learners, who choose to code-switch for positive rather than negative reasons.  

Making a blog about code-switching

This semester with two of my groups I decided to broach the use of French in English class, by asking students to examine their own use of French during class time using a code-switching blog [3]. It was pretty easy to set up. I spent the first lesson exploring the topic with them. First, they did an online quiz about their own languages and ideas about plurilinguism and then they shared their responses in a group discussion. After that we did an information gap activity with different groups reading different short texts about plurilinguism, translanguaging, language repertoires and language biographies.

Next, each student created a poster to represent his or her language biography, which they then presented to a small group of classmates, answering questions, and explaining the images they had chosen. To finish this exploration, as a class group we discussed whether they were actually as monolingual as many of them had said in response to the online quiz. Finally, I presented the idea of keeping a blog about code-switching in the classroom, so that we could all have clearer ideas about when and why they used French during English class. When was this code-switching helping them to learn? And when was it hindering progress?

It was simple to set up, I used Padlet [4] to create an online shared blog, with a section for each student. We agreed that at the end of each lesson, they’d make an entry to talk about how, when and why they’d used French and English during the class. I left the blog open, so they could also read each other’s comments and comment on them if they wanted to. I encouraged them to write in whichever language came easiest (English or French), and to see writing on the blog as a way of learning about being a learner, rather than as a moment to directly work on improving their English language skills.

What were their experiences?

At the end of the semester, I asked them to complete a quick online questionnaire about their experiences during class time, in order to get an idea about how they felt about the experience. The results were generally positive. A number of students said that participating in the blog “made me think”, that “it was interesting to develop what we think about English”, and that it “activated reflexion about the moment”. So, in terms of developing student reflection the activity could bear interesting fruits.  

Students also appreciated the place that the blog gave to the expression of emotions. They noted the importance of “having a moment to express our emotions”, to be able to “sum up what we did, felt, or struggled with during the class”. They also talked about blogging as an “interesting moment to share points of view”, and “to have everyone’s opinion”. Could making a blog be a means of building solidarity by increasing understanding of others’ learning experiences? This could be especially useful in mixed level groups.

I’m feeling pretty enthusiastic about the experience and I’m planning to continue with it next semester.  It does need some tweaking; more reflection about the instructions, how to ensure students are writing from the heart and not choosing to project a ‘good student’ version of themselves because they know the teacher will read what they say!

Questions I’m asking myself are; what would happen if I set it up as a French writing activity? Or if I turned it into a private journaling experience? Or if I dedicated periods of class time to reading each other’s comments? To sum up, for me code-switching blogging is experimental for the moment but seems to have interesting potential.  Why not give it a go? And if you do, don’t hesitate to contact me, I’d love to know how it works with other groups.

References

N. Evnitskaya and E. Berger, “Learners’ Multimodal Displays of Willingness to Participate in Classroom Interaction in the L2 and CLIL Contexts,” Classroom Discourse, vol. 8, no. 1, pp. 1-24 (2017)

D.K. Palmer, R. A. Martinez, S. G. Mateus and K. Henderson, “Reframing the Debate on Language Separation: Toward a Vision for Translanguaging Pedagogies in the Dual Language Classroom,” The Modern Language Journal, vol. 98, no. 3, pp. 757-772, (2014)

K. Fritson, “Impact of Journaling on Students’ Self-Efficacy and Locus of Control,” InSight: A Journal of Scholarly Teaching, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 75-83, (2008)

Padlet - https://padlet.com

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