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the students’ repertoire, so the teacher gave the equivalent and the Indonesian meaning of the difficult words.
b. Explaining Grammar
The second function of code switching done by the English teacher was
explaining grammar. According to Polio and Duff cited in Jingxia, 2010, teachers are very unwilling to teach grammar in the target language for various
reasons, such as time-saving, grammar-oriented exams, and worries about too much pressure on the studies. Martin Jones cited in Jingxia, 2010 also stated that
teachers teach grammar in L2-L1-L2 sequence. The following examples would provide considerable support for the conclusion drawn from the previous studies.
[17] T: Close-closer than-the closest. Ini apa anak-anak? S: Degree of comparison.
[18] T: Yak, degree of comparison. The examples above occurred when the teacher and the students were
having a short discussion about the degree of comparison which is one of the parts of English grammar. There was an example of degree of comparison, then the
teacher asked the students to make sure whether they have already known about it or not. Actually, there were some students who have known about it. In this
situation, the teacher did code switching to explain grammar. We can see that the teacher asked the student in Indonesian by saying “Ini apa anak-anak?” after he
mentioned the words “close-closer than-the closest”. The teacher also inserted Indonesian tag “Yak” in his utterance when he agreed with the students’ answer.
From the example [17] and [18], it could be concluded that the teacher did code switching to explain grammar to the students.
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Here is another example of code switching aimed to explain grammar: [19] T: Yang ini disebut apa anak-anak? Is it a verb?
In the example [19], the teacher and the students were still having a short discussion about the degree of comparison. However, the teacher asked the
students about the part of speech of a word. The teacher appointed a word and asked the students by saying inter-sentential code switching. His utterance was
“Yang ini disebut apa anak-anak? Is it a verb?”. From the example, we could see that the teacher checked the students about their grammar understanding,
especially part of speech. It could be concluded that the teacher did code switching to explain grammar to his students.
From the examples of code switching above, we can see that the English teacher of SMP N 2 Mlati did code switching to explain grammar. By seeing the
fact that the students are not very familiar with the terms of English grammar, the English teacher tended to use code switching as a bridge in order to make the
students understand. If the teacher used grammatical terms in English to explain the complicated grammar, he would take more time and caused problems with the
students’ understanding.
c. Managing Class
