The scene: a staffroom, somewhere in the world, possibly Hungary, with English teachers busily prepping in the usual way - cutting up a hundred slips of paper, tweaking a PPT, cueing audio, laminating a catchy visual, or reminding themselves of the difference between the present perfect simple and the present perfect continuous. Teacher A suddenly pipes up:
A: You know, I’m not sure I can explain the difference between present perfect simple and continuous. There are so many cases where they are basically the same!
B: [rolling her eyes] Yeah, like I’ve crashed the car and I’ve been crashing the car. EXACTLY the same!
A: okay, but you know what I mean.
B: Well, just put the language in a clear, fun context to help get the meaning across. Use a story. Use pics. Use mime. Talk about your bad car-crashy weekend.
A: Hmm, I dunno… I’m not feeling creative enough for that.
C: Well…why not use Hungarian? They could compare English and Hungarian sentences…and if they are still stuck, you could explain some more…in Hungarian?
There is a sharp intake of breath. A gasp. Then silence.
A: But I…I…I’m not supposed to use their mother tongue. It’s bad for them!
B: [to teacher C] Get out. I banish you from this staffroom.
Teacher C backs slowly out of the staffroom. He grabs his Országh László dictionary on the way out.
End.
While I’m quite confident such an extreme exchange J is unlikely to have taken place, in Hungary or elsewhere, in my experience many teachers feel a residual guilt when it comes to using L1 in the classroom. It’s one of those “hot button” issues – it arouses both strong feelings and a level of uncertainty (see also: correction, PPP, learning styles and, more recently, AI).
What are your feelings regarding the use of L1 in the classroom? Here are some questions to help you reflect on this. Read them, think for a couple of minutes about your answers, and then jot your thoughts down on a piece of paper or your laptop:
-
How often do you use L1 in the classroom and why?
-
What are some pros of using L1?
-
What are some cons – why do some people strongly oppose it?
-
Can you think of any principled techniques or procedures that involve use of L1?
Don’t read on – do take a good 15 minutes to think and then note your answers. Don’t cheat. I’m watching you.
Ready?
We’ll go through these one by one.
How often do you use L1 in the classroom and why?
This is obviously the one question I cannot really comment on as the answer is personal to you. I hope, though, that it prompted you to reflect on what, how often and why you use L1 – because, in fact, as you’ll see below, this blog entry is as much about reflection-on-action as it is about use of L1. More on that shortly!
What are some pros of using L1?
There is much we could say for this and the next question. I’ll limit myself to the first five ideas that come to mind:
-
Use of L1 allows the teacher to offer comprehensible explanations for complex ideas e.g. difficult grammar rules. Sometimes helping students “discover” rules is not the optimal solution. The same can be true for vocabulary – why take a long time explaining when you could just quickly translate?
-
You can set up and / or check complex tasks using L1 – in other words, it can support classroom management.
-
It is good for rapport – it reinforces what you share with your students: a common tongue. It can remind them that English is not “unlearnable”: they can aspire to your level of achievement!
-
It is an efficient way to deal with administrative issues, or indeed discipline.
-
It is a particularly useful tool in certain contexts e.g. low levels, young learners, learners who have only just started dipping their toes in the waters of communicative language teaching. It can be very reassuring for such learners to know the whole lesson won’t be carried out in an odd language.
And cons?
-
Some teachers believe that you need to be able to think in L2 – using L1 too much in the classroom disrupts this process. Whether they realise it or not, teachers who think this are aligning with the Direct Method, which was a reaction against the very old-fashioned Grammar Translation ethos that preceded it.
-
Classroom time is precious! In many cases learners have limited opportunities to use English outside of the classroom. The percentage of time spent listening to and using English should therefore be maximised.
-
Apples and oranges. L1 and L2 are simply different…so what’s the point in always comparing them?
-
It does not help in multilingual classes. It’s all very well if your learners share a mother tongue, but this is not always the case, particularly outside of primary and secondary school contexts.
-
The techniques that exist are old-fashioned and dull…sit down and translate this 200-word text etc. It kills enthusiasm and dynamism.
Now, just hold your horses (or should I say álljon meg a menet!): fairly recently at least two excellent books have come out swinging for L1 and translation activities (see the recommended reading at the end), so it’s not fair to call it old-fashioned. And – to put my cards on the table – I’ve reflected on the issue a lot and I’m broadly in favour of use of L1 when it is used judiciously and in a principled way. All of the pros above seem sound to me; and the cons are a little easier, at least in some cases, to refute (though I do think classroom time is precious, and a significant percentage should be spent in collaborative groupwork in L2…. but let’s save that for another post).
For instance, it’s precisely because languages can be so different that contrastive analysis is a useful technique, highlighting clearly side-by-side target sentences with grammar points in L1 and L2, or indeed collocations – which differ from language to language in random and unexpected way. For example:
-
I've been living here for 12 years.
-
Tizenkét éve lakom itt.
Contrasting sentences in this way can help learners more clearly notice differences, and perhaps move away from mistranslating by default.
Another technique is an old one but has great power in the modern communicative and collaborative classroom: Retranslation. You can read more about it in my summary here but, in a nutshell, the teacher gives students in groups a short text (50-100 words). They translate it from English into L1. The teacher takes the texts away. Then, after a time delay (e.g. next lesson), they are given the L1 version and asked to translate it back to English: in other words to retranslate it. They then compare their versions, underlining any differences. Retranslation is a very powerful way to help learners notice differences between L1 and L2, and this can help “restructure” their interlanguage, pushing their understanding of L2 further along in a way that a straight explanation might not.
Those are only two techniques. There are plenty more.
Reflecting on Reflection
I hope you found this thought-provoking. I hope it caused you to reflect on your beliefs and practices: because this was the ultimate purpose of this blog post. I firmly believe that one of our ambitions if we are dedicated to this craft we call teaching is to become a life-long reflective teacher. This necessitates reflecting on our practices, on what we do and why we do them – do we do them because it is what we always do, because it is convenient, or because it is the right thing to do for our learners?
The above focus on use of L1 was a small taste of what Donald Schön called reflection-on-action: reflecting on what we do after doing it (in contrast to the equally vital reflection-in-action: reflecting as we teach). An expert teacher engages in reflection-on-action and reflection-in-action instinctively and frequently. It is the essence of reflective practice, the beating heart of our professional development.
Do you engage in reflective practice, and how systematically?
This is why this Autumn we are starting our Reading & Discussion Group for teachers, offering it for free as a tool to help cultivate teacher reflection. We hope you can join us!
In the words of Jerry Cortsen “Never forget to remain a student while you teach others”.
Recommended Reading:
-
Guy Cook: Translation in Language Teaching, OUP, 2010
-
Philip Kerr: Translation and Own-language Activities, CUP, 2014
-
Donald Schön: The Reflective Practitioner, Basic Books, 1984