Discourse and educational functions of students’ and teachers’ code-switching in EFL classrooms in Turkey

• Students and teachers in EFL classrooms generally use code-switching purposefully to achieve educational or discourse functions. • Code-switching is a natural and deliberate process in EFL classrooms that both enhances student learning and eases teachers’ delivering messages in a clearer way. • In a language teaching context, a language classroom is a community of practice where the members of the community achieve a common social and educational goal by using the languages available to them. Code-switching (CS) is frequently used in English as a Foreign Language classrooms (EFL) serving different discourse and educational functions. This paper reports on a case study investigating the forms and functions of code-switching used by the students and the teachers in EFL classrooms in a Turkish university, where the language of instruction was English. Data were gathered from two advanced classes, two pre-intermediate classes and one intermediate class through video-recordings. The data obtained from these recordings were transcribed and analysed using the transcription software EXMARaLDA. The results suggest that the most frequent form of code-switching was observed to be using discourse markers. Both the teachers and students used code-switching in the classes for educational and communicative reasons, in particular, to achieve better communication, to deliver content, and to deal with classroom management problems. Implications of the findings for educators and language learning contexts are also discussed.