During the 20th century, it was commonly assumed that the best way to teach English as a foreign language was through the exclusive use of English as the medium of instruction. Although recent publications have challenged this view, many educational policy-makers in schools and universities still tend to to insist on “English only”, and decry the practice of codeswitching between the target language and the first languages of learners and teachers. Findings from a recent volume of case studies clearly show that codeswitching is a common practice across a wide range of university EFL classrooms in Asian contexts. In many cases, this codeswitching may be regarded as a “flexible convergent approach”, where languages are switched more or less spontaneously and at random. Often, however, the teachers reported in Barnard and McLellan (2014) responsibly alternated between languages in a principled and systematic way. This paper presents and discusses observational data and extracts from interviews with teachers on the rationale for codeswitching. Thus codeswitching is both normal and can be pedagogically justifiable. The paper will then suggest how teachers can reflect in-, on- and for-action (Farrell, 2007) by systematically recording, listening to, and analysing their use of language(s) in their own classrooms, using a set of interactional categories (Bowers, 1980). Reflective practitioners may then develop collaborative action research projects (Burns, 1999, 2010) which could empower them to critique and challenge monolingual language-in-education policies.
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