The paper addresses the phenomenon of code-switching in English as a foreign language (EFL) classes conducted in lower-secondary schools (ISCED 2) in the Czech Republic. Since the Czech Republic is a relatively monolingual country, the presented analysis intends to uncover some of the contextualization mechanisms underlying the switching between Czech (i.e. the mother tongue of the teachers and pupils) and English (i.e. the target language of the classes). More generally, the analysis reveals how the phenomenon of multilingualism is reflected in classroom interaction in the context of compulsory education in the Czech Republic, in which English is the first foreign language that the learners learn in schools.

In addition, the research aims to contribute to the understanding of expertise, which can be defined as “characteristics, skills, and knowledge that distinguish experts from novices and less experienced people”; experts “are consistently able to exhibit superior performance for  representative tasks in a domain” (Ericsson, 2006, p. 3). In the context of foreign language teaching, one of such representative tasks is the participation in (and the controlling of) classroom interaction, which (in the case of a monolingual class) takes place in English and also in the mother tongue. Since the interactional order in everyday interactions can be revealed by conversation analysis (CA), the outcomes of this research can also be used to characterize expert performances in the context of foreign language teaching in a monolingual country (such as the Czech Republic).

Theoretically and methodologically the study builds on Auer’s sequential approach to code-switching (e.g. Auer, 1998; Auer & Eastman, 2010), which employs CA and views the instances of code-switching  as potential contextualization cues.

The aim of the presented analysis was to uncover the contextualization mechanisms underlying conversational code-switching in teacher-student classroom interaction. The data comprised 13 videorecordings of EFL classes conducted by 13 expert teachers in lower-secondary schools in the Czech Republic. The analysis revealed how code-switching was used to contextualize (1) digressions, (2) repair work and (3) reiterations. 

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