In the context of higher education (HE) internationalization, English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) plays a crucial role in academic and interactive communication, often intersecting with local languages. This enables greater flexibility in language use and code-switching (CS) between English and the local language. While previous research on English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) has predominantly examined the perspectives of local stakeholders, the views of international students have been largely underexplored. To bridge this gap, this study investigates the perceptions of both local and international students regarding CS practices within EMI courses across specific classroom situations. The findings reveal that both groups support the conditional use of the local language to promote comprehension while ensuring inclusivity. Local students demonstrate a broader acceptance of CS compared to their international counterparts, particularly in relation to academic outcomes such as understanding instruction and assessment. In contrast, international students show greater receptiveness to CS during interactive classroom discussions, which reflects their attitudes toward engaging with local peers. These insights contribute to the development of more nuanced EMI policies and deepen our understanding of language dynamics in HE contexts where English is not the native language.

Nam, Sin-Hye. 2015. “The Discourse Functions of Code Switching on SNS texts : focusing on the case of Facebook”. The Sociolinguistic Journal of Korea 23(1). 31~53. This study aims to figure out the discourse functions of code switching which appears in the texts posted on SNS, especially Facebook. In order to satisfy this purpose, this study observed and analysed several individual timeline pages whose owners have a plural language background, but live in a monolingual society. The results are as follows. First, a lot of code switching examples appeared in the observed texts, even though the writer lived in a monolingual society. Second, the unmarked code of the individual writers was their mother language and it was chosen when the posting was about the writer's everyday life and appeared as a longer passage. Third, when the writers chose their marked code, they had at least four particular reasons that were related to discourse functions; including or excluding a particular reader, using more effective words, emphasizing or watering down the implications of the text, and changing the speech act or topic. Finally, these results show that the community on SNS is closer to a plural lingual society rather than a closed monolingual community. On SNS, the users act as if they live in a multi lingual space and perform as plural linguals, although, in the reality, they live in a very monolingual society. And this is one of the important characteristics of a SNS discourse community.

The present study aims at investigating problems with a TEE class in terms of classroom activities and code-switching. One middle school teacher and her students participated in the study. The teacher taught a writing class in TEE context. She taught more than half of the class in English. Her students experienced different interactional patterns in four different activities. However, most of the students could not participate both in pair work and group work without her teacher’s help. That was because the teacher had problems with giving instructions: (1) her instructions about the activities were not clear enough; (2) she did not provide any modelling for the activities; and (3) she did not check any clarifications for the activities. Also, the ratio of the teacher’s utterance to students’ was too high: 96% in English and 89.5% in Korean. In addition, she did not use any pause in code-switching from English to Korean, deprived of checking whether her students understood the target language input given in English. Directions for further research and pedagogical implications will be discussed.