Before going further about the role of code switching in EFL classrooms, it is worth to know the difference between English as Foreign Language (EFL) and English as Second Language (ESL). Literally, the difference between EFL and ESL are EFL is a UK term and ESL is American term. Despite a distinction between them are, EFL is a process of teaching English to non-native speaker in a non-English speaking country while ESL is a process of teaching English in an English speaking country to non-native speakers.
Indonesia is categorized as a non-English speaking country, so English taught as a foreign language in the classrooms. English is the only foreign language that becomes a compulsory subject in Indonesia. In KTSP 2006 curriculum English…show more content… Although code switching mostly happen in a bilingual community or environments but code switching in EFL classroom is also a widely observed phenomenon. Simon (in Jendra, 2010, p. 12) proposes three reasons the code switching often happen in EFL classrooms. First code switching increase in EFL classrooms because the teacher knows the knowledge of foreign language but the students only have a limited knowledge about it. Second EFL classrooms consist of multilingual students which have a different pedagogical situation. They share their knowledge about a pedagogical contract which governs their code choice in different pedagogical situations. Last teachers and students have institutionally and socially predetermined roles; teacher-status is related to the use of a foreign language while students-status is related to the implicit obligation to the use of foreign…show more content… Most of this research has been conducted in a bilingual setting, i.e. the pupils encounter L2 in most if not all of their classes. For example, Merritt et al. (1992) have studied primary schools in Kenya and their aim was to make observations on how teachers used several languages during teaching and how they used code switching in the classrooms. They found out that there were four different types of code switching: 1) code switching is used in the reformulation across codes, saying the same thing using a different language, 2) code switching is used in the content of the activity, bringing new information to the discourse by using another code; 3) code switching is used in translation or word substitution within one sentence; 4) code switching is used with interactional