The aim of this article is to describe the interactional and pedagogical relevante of episodes of explicit reflection upon language (i.e. the presence of metalinguistic and metacomunicative comenis) and code-switching between the fust and the foreign language. These are two types of linguistic phenomena which appear very frequently in EFL classroom discourse and that are seen by the authors as closely interrelated. From an analytical point of view, the study stands within the field of discouse analysis. The data analyzed have been obtained thorugh the method of participant observation and consist of five hours of recorded and transcribed EFL classroom discourse.