Exploring the Role of Code-Switching in Italian EFL Classrooms: Functions and Patterns

Although code-switching (CS) has been studied in EFL classrooms for 30 years, no research to date has focussed on a European setting. With its multilingual instructional context — where Standard Italian, regional dialects, and English as FL coexist simultaneously — Italy constitutes a theoretically distinctive and hitherto unexamined instructional context for CS research. Applying Poplack’s (1980) typology, the study explored EFL teachers’ functions, patterns, timing and metacognitive bases for CS. Data were collected from 11 Italian EFL teachers across 55 online B2 lessons and supplemented by Stimulated Recall Protocol (SRP) sessions. Results showed that giving instructions and checking understanding accounted for 26% each of switches, while 47% of switches were produced during the core phase of instruction. Seven out of eleven teachers favoured inter-sentential switching. SRP analysis showed switches to be mostly conscious and pedagogically motivated, although affective switches displayed the hallmarks of automatisation that are typical of routinised teacher decision-making. These results establish the first European empirical baseline on EFL teacher CS and provide the first direct evidence on the metacognitive bases of switching decisions in this research tradition.