This paper is concerned with the problem of tracking control for a class of switched nonlinear systems in lower triangular form with unknown functions and arbitrary switchings. Two classes of state feedback controllers are constructed by adopting the adaptive backstepping technique, and both of them are designed by using the common Lyapunov function (CLF) method. The first controller is designed under multiple adaptive laws. Then, the second one is designed based on constructing a maximum common adaptive parameter, which can overcome the problem of over-parameterization of the first controllers. It is shown that the designed state-feedback controllers can ensure that all the signals remain bounded and the tracking error converges to a small neighborhood of the origin. Finally, simulation results are presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed approaches. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.