Abstract

Due to the still reigning prevalence of the Communicative Language Teaching method (CLT) in Mexico, both the students and the institutions expect the teachers to follow an English-only approach in the EFL classroom. However, so far undocumented evidence suggests that teachers often resort to Spanish in their instruction whether due to ideological motives, because they subscribe to the more recently emerged English as an International Language (EIL) approach, or simply for practical reasons. The current project explored this phenomenon by classifying the code-switching/code-mixing interactions in the EFL classroom through the analysis of transcripts of video recordings of teacher trainees in the final year of their BA course. Following a case-by-case methodology, the teachers’ self-interpreted utterances (between the L1, Spanish, and the L2, English) were categorized along the taxonomy established by Cecilia Wadensjö in the field of Community Interpreting (CI) to draw up a linguistic profile that may help the trainees improve their practices. As the case presented here exemplifies, this exercise, especially with the teacher trainee’s involvement, may prove a useful tool in reflecting upon bilingual language use in the EFL classroom.