The use of the mother tongue in the classroom John Harbord

Teachers and trainers who work with non-native-speaker colleagues will be aware of frequent differences of opinion over the question of whether or not to use the students' mother tongue in the classroom. With the expansion of ELT in Eastern Europe, this question is becoming progressively more of a stumbling block to co-operation between local teachers and those sent from Britain. This article seeks to look at various ways in which teachers at the chalkface use L 7 and what theoretical view of language learning (if any) motivates them to do so, as well as to compare these with some alternative techniques using the target language.

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Background

The idea of avoiding the mother tongue in language teaching dates from around the turn of the century, with the appearance of the direct method. The development of ELT as a casual career for young people visiting Europe encouraged teachers to make a virtue of the necessity of using only English. Added to this, the subsequent growth of a British-based teacher training movement out of the need to provide training for teachers working with multilingual classes served to reinforce the strategy of mother tongue avoidance. Over the years, the effect of this on those non-native speakers who make up the vast majority of language teachers has been to make them feel either defensive or guilty at their inability to 'match up' to native speakers in terms of conducting a class entirely in English. Many may have tried to switch to an 'all-English classroom', only tofindthemselves inadequately equipped with L2 strategies with which to get their meaning across; faced with student incomprehension and resentment at this new game, they revert to use of the mother tongue. At the same time, however, there has been a movement in certain parts of the world in reaction to an influx of unqualified native speakers whose only object was to earn enough money to keep them in comfort until they moved on to their next destination. As a consequence, schools or companies in some countries have shied away from employing native speakers, whether qualified or not, on the grounds that their ignorance of the students' mother tongue renders them incapable of explaining the system of the language to the students.

Some arguments for using the

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Atkinson (1987: 422), in his discussion of mother tongue use in EFL, offers three reasons for allowing limited LI use in the classroom: It is a 'learner-preferred strategy'. Given the opportunity, learners will choose to translate without encouragement from the teacher. (Though it is worth noting that research by Del Mar et al. (1982) suggests that
ELT Journal Volume 4614 October 1992 Oxford University Press 1992

this is only true of beginner and pre-intermediate students.) Danchev (1982) argues similarly and rather more convincingly that translation/ transfer is a natural phenomenon and an inevitable part of second language acquisition even where no formal classroom learning occurs. Learners will inevitably (and even unconsciously) attempt to equate a target language structure or lexical item with its closest or most common correlate in the mother tongue, regardless of whether or not the teacher offers or 'permits' translation. He argues therefore that methodology should attempt to work with this natural tendency rather than against it. This is not a call for extensive LI use, as Danchev himself has agreed,1 but rather a justification for its limited use in certain situations.
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2: A humanistic approach

To let students use their mother tongue is a humanistic approach in that it permits them to say what they want. This appears a reasonable enough point and few teachers would refuse to help a student who asked, for example, 'How can I say "a m'est e'gal"?'. Indeed, many contemporary course books make regular use of such strategies. Even so, this is hardly advocating a major return to LI use in the classroom, and most writers would probably agree that as far as possible the students should try to explain what they want to say in English. LI strategies are efficient in terms of time spent explaining. This is certainly the reason most commonly given by teachers who advocate LI use in the classroom, and it will be discussed in detail below. While teachers and theorists may disagree about the role of mother tongue strategies in the classroom, most agree that, in the interests of the development of language as a communicative tool, communication in the classroom should take place as far as possible in English. Atkinson (1987: 426), although generally in favour of LI use, warns that excessive dependency is likely to result in some or all of the following: 1 The teacher and/or the students begin to feel that they have not 'really' understood any item of language until it has been translated. 2 The teacher and/or the students fail to observe the distinctions between equivalence of form, semantic equivalence, and pragmatic features, and thus oversimplify to the point of using crude and inaccurate translation. 3 Students speak to the teacher in the mother tongue as a matter of course, even when they quite capable of expressing what they mean. 4 Students fail to realize that during many activities in the classroom it is essential that they use only English. If proponents of task-based teaching such as Prabhu (1987) and Willis (1990) are right, it is not so much what the teacher chooses to isolate and explain in the way of grammar that the students will pick up but the language the teacher uses in negotiating meaning with the students: giving instructions, checking meaning, and so on. If such is the case, there will need to be appreciable advantages to be gained from using the mother
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3: An efficient use of time Some considerations regarding use of the target language

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tongue in order for these to outweigh the disadvantage of the loss of this authentic transaction. I will argue that if a mother-tongue strategy achieves gains in areas such as time-saving or improving teacher-student rapport at the expense of causing the above problems, it must be regarded as suspect and replaced wherever possible by a corresponding L2 strategy. In the remainder of this article, I will look at a variety of mother-tongue strategies I have encountered in various parts of Europe.2 These can be divided into three categories on the basis of the teacher's objective in using LI: 1 facilitating teacher-student communication 2 facilitating teacher-student rapport 3 facilitating learning. Using L1 to facilitate communication This is the largest of the three categories in that it contains not only 'message-getting-across' strategies, but also time-saving strategies. Atkinson (1987) gives time-saving as one of his principle arguments in favour of using LI and, at a practical level, the most frequent justification given by teachers for LI use is that time saved by communicating in the mother tongue can be used for more productive activities. Table 1 gives a list of strategies which are principally communication facilitative.

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Table 1: Group A Group strategies Discussion of classroom methodology during the early stages of a course. Explaining the meaning of a grammatical item (e.g. a verb tense) at the time of presentation, especially when a correlate structure does not exist in L1. Giving instructions for a task to be carried out by the students. Asking or giving administrative information such as timetable changes, etc., or allowing students to ask or answer these in L1. Checking comprehension of a listening or reading text. Group B Explaining the meaning of a word by translation. Checking comprehension of structure, e.g. 'How do you say "I've been waiting for ten minutes" in (L1)?' Allowing or inviting students to give a translation of a word as a comprehension check. Eliciting vocabulary by giving the L1 equivalent. Group C LI explanations by students to peers who have not understood. Giving individual help to a weaker student, e.g. during individual or pair work. Student-student comparison or discussion of work done.

Group A strategies

Group A strategies are of the type that are likely to involve fairly extended LI teacher or teacher-student discussion. They are therefore suspect strategies unless they offer considerable benefits otherwise not available to the class. In discussing methodology the possible benefits would indeed seem to be the prime consideration: if students are unfamiliar with a new approach, the teacher who cannot or will not give an explanation in LI may cause considerable student demotivation. Explaining the meaning of a grammatical item, on the other hand, is an integral part of the language course and as such should ideally be conducted in English.
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Most often, teachers resort to LI to explain grammar because they feel that L2 explanation is too complicated, and may even feel themselves incapable of giving a clear and unambiguous explanation of the structure in question exclusively in English. This may often be due to inadequate training in alternative L2 strategies such as 'time lines' or 'concept questions' with which, having prepared in advance, the teacher should be able to communicate the meaning of a structure unambiguously without recourse to the mother tongue. In the light of contemporary methodology one might also question the usefulness of the teacher talking to the students at length about the meaning of the language rather than designing exercises to encourage the students to use the language, and to examine their own internal model of interlanguage to try to induce rules. By the same token, giving instructions for a task is one of the most genuine opportunities for teacher-student communication in the classroom. As mentioned earlier, the most recent developments in theory suggest that this is an important source of language for student acquisition. To sacrifice this, as Atkinson suggests, in order to be able to set up complicated communicative interaction activities, would seem to be counter-productive. If the teacher feels that a complex activity might reap benefits outweighing the drawbacks of time devoted to explanation, one viable L2 strategy might be to make a language learning activity out of the instructions themselves (e.g. a text with comprehension questions). The subsequent activity would then become a valid test of comprehension of the task involving the instructions. Dealing with class administration in LI is a strategy usually mentioned by non-native speakers who feel unable to maintain the convention of L2 communication outside the context of the language lesson proper. Whether this is because of unsympathetic attitudes of colleagues or students, it seems an unfortunate decision which is likely to reflect negatively on the status of English as a means of communication. However, it is difficult to offer any help in this matter except to encourage the teacher to persevere in the hope that students will become used to using L2. The final strategy in group A, of using LI for checking listening or reading skills, seems once again a decision to throw out a valid opportunity for communication in order to save time, and cannot really be recommended on any grounds.3 Group B strategies The strategies in group B all rely on translation as a time-saving device. As such, they must be evaluated critically as to the extent to which they invoke Atkinson's consequences one and two. Most involve single lexical items translated out of context and, while the teacher will obviously take care not to use such strategies where there is a risk of ambiguity or where one-to-one translation is not possible, their combined use would seem highly likely to give students the impression that word-for-word translation is a useful technique. Obviously these strategies are not being
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proscribed utterly, but it would seem advisable to use an alternative L2 strategy wherever possible. Some effective target language strategies (despite a somewhat dismissive treatment by Atkinson) are visual prompts, mime, and evoking situational context to create a need for the item in question (for eliciting), together with paraphrase, definition, and multiple exemplification. Surreptitious use of the third strategy listed (allowing students to give a translation as a comprehension check) has been cited as effective by many teachers and has also been used by the author without students becoming dependent on translation. Group C strategies Group C strategies may all set a precedent for LI communication in the classroom. The first (explanations by students to peers who have not understood) is certainly a habit that in most cases will occur without encouragement from the teacher. By focusing on certain students as weak and therefore deserving of special treatment, the first and second strategies may also consolidate a class hierarchy which has a negative effect on those weaker students by reinforcing their reliance on the mother tongue. Asking students to compare or discuss their work, on the other hand, is an extremely valuable activity that fosters both student cooperation and independence of thought. The advantages of such activities are so great that at lower levels it will be more beneficial to allow students to do this thoroughly in LI than to do it tokenistically in L2 or not at all. Using L1 to facilitate teacherstudent relationships This is a fairly minor category and only a few teachers admit to using LI for this purpose. Again it should be emphasized that, while good group dynamics may facilitate learning, this may also be achieved using L2 strategies, and it is the choice of LI for this purpose that is under discussion. The following strategies have been mentioned: chatting in LI before the start of the lesson to reduce student anxiety; telling jokes in LI. Once again, these are likely to have a fairly negative effect on the overall tendency towards L2 use in the classroom. Lowering student anxiety and achieving a good teacher-student rapport are very desirable aims and greatly to be encouraged: but when many effective L2 strategies are available to the teacher, the advantages of LI use for this purpose would seem to be outweighed by the potential dangers. Alternative strategies might include telling simple jokes or chatting to the students in L2 before the lesson or during breaks, and being prepared to reveal as much personal information about oneself as one asks of the students. Using L1 to facilitate learning ofL2 This final category will be concerned principally with the evaluation of strategies which aim specifically at aiding L2 acquisition through comparison with LI. These strategies have two purposes: the first is to make students aware of the dangers of translation and teach them to exercise a conscious check on the validity of their unconscious translation; and the second is to teach them ways of working towards what Danchev (1982: 55) calls 'functional translation' (i.e. transferring meaning into L2) rather than the word-for-word translation that occurs
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when the learner's unconscious need to make assumptions and correlations between languages is ignored. One of the best sources of ideas in this area is Duff (1989), who recommends the use of exercises involving the translation of single words or phrases in context (1989: 51). This is a crucial difference that distinguishes Duff's work from the time-saving strategies mentioned earlier. Whereas translation out of context encourages students to translate word for word, translation within a specific context, by contrast, makes them more fully aware of the problems of single-word translation. The object here is not to save time, but to use it effectively to help students to understand that what works in their mother tongue may not work in English. One experimental technique of a similar nature I have used in teaching is to give students a text in the mother tongue with selected words or phrases in English. This may serve as a vocabulary pre-teaching exercise or equally as a revision activity. Conclusion Perhaps the most important point to be made in the discussion on the rights and wrongs of using the mother tongue in the classroom is that translation, and indeed use of the mother tongue generally, is not a device to be used to save time for 'more useful' activities, nor to make life easier for the teacher or the students. Instead, as Duff says, it should be used to provoke discussion and speculation, to develop clarity and flexibility of thinking, and to help us increase our own and our students' awareness of the inevitable interaction between the mother tongue and the target language that occurs during any type of language acquisition. Received February 1992

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Notes 1 Personal communication. 2 Strategies given here are from a list of mothertongue strategies encountered by the author in teacher training and through discussion with colleagues. Several of these are also cited by Atkinson (1987:423) as having been chosen from a larger sample (not listed) as 'useful techniques' on the basis of a ten-month experimental period with students who had studied between 0 and 200 hours of English. 3 Although this strategy is suggested by Atkinson as one of the techniques he has found useful in teaching low-level students, the author has never encountered teachers who have advocated its use, and even those who favour LI use have generally rejected it as being counter-productive.

classroom: a neglected resource?'. ELT Journal 41/4. Danchev, A. 1982. 'Transfer and Translation'. Finnlance 2: 39-61. Del-Mar, M., M. Viano, and V. Orquin. 1982. 'Identifying our students' strategies for learning EFL'. Modern English Teacher. 9/4. Duff, A. 1989. Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prabhu, N. S. 1987. Second Language Pedagogy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Willis, D. 1990. The Lexical Syllabus. London: Collins ELT.

References Atkinson, D. 1987. 'The mother tongue in the

The author John Harbord has worked in Hungary, Bulgaria, Estonia, Finland, and Turkey as a teacher, trainer, and director of studies. He is currently working as a director of studies of a language school in Bmo, Czechoslovakia. 355

Mother tongue in the classroom