With this article it is my aim to determine to what extent discourse analysis (from a conversational point of view) is applied to language teaching research (from the point of view of the communicative approach). The sphere of application of discourse analysis is invoked by the omnipresence of verbal exchange (conversation) in second language classes, which may be seen as paradigmatic situations of language contact. Conversation contains specific bifunctional strategies that operate simultaneously as learning/teaching and communicative strategies. Among these bifunctional strategies, code-switching represents one of the most important. I will present a specific type of code-switching, conversational code-switching, which will be illustrated through a side-by-side presentation of examples taken from bilingual and exolingual contexts. Finally, I will analyze the examples in order to draw some conclusions.