THE USE OF L1 BY ATKINSON

At present it would seem to be true, in general, that in teacher training very little attention is given
to the use of the native language. It is possible to identify four reasons for this that are particularly
influential:

1 The association of translation with the grammar/translation method

2 An environment where the trainer (a native speaker and perhaps a monoglot) focuses mainly or
exclusively on the relatively unrepresentative situation of a native speaker teaching a multilingual
class in Britain or the USA.

3 The recent influence of Krashen and his associates whose theories have promoted the ideas that
‘learning’ (as opposed to ‘acquisition’) is of little value and that transfer has only a minor role to
play.

4 The truism that you can only learn English by speaking English. This is axiomatic; however, it
does not necessarily follow that English should therefore always be the only language used in
every classroom.

Atkinson argues that at early levels a ratio of about 5 per cent native language to about 95 per
cent target language may be more profitable.

Some general advantages of mother-tongue use.

- Translation techniques form a part of the preferred learning strategies of most learners in
most places, the importance of which should not be underestimated.
- Allows students to say what they really want to say sometimes (surely a valuable
‘humanistic’ element in the classroom). Clearly once it is established what the learners
want to say, the teacher can then encourage them to find a way of expressing their
meaning in English or, if necessary, help out.
- Can be very efficient as regards the amount of time needed to achieve a specific aim, if
only because in general, such techniques need the help of only a blackboard and involve
little preparation.

Some uses of the mother tongue

- Eliciting language (all levels): For example, ‘How do you say X in English?‘. This can often
be less timeconsuming and can involve less potential ambiguity than other methods of
eliciting such as visuals, mime, ‘creating a need’, etc.
- Checking comprehension (all levels): The mother tongue can be used to check
comprehension of the concept behind a structure. This technique encourages students to
develop the ability to distinguish between ‘structural, semantic and pragmatic’
equivalence (Widdowson 1974, quoted in Brumfit and Johnson 1979:65) and as such is
particularly useful. The mother tongue can also be used to check comprehension of a
listening or reading text. a comprehension task which does involve production, but
 presented in the students’ mother tongue, can sometimes probe comprehension more
effectively than many types of non-linguistic tasks designed to avoid the problem of
recoding in the target language.
- Giving instructions (early levels): At very low levels, many communicative interaction
activities for early level students, while very useful in themselves, can be rather
complicated to set up. In some cases a satisfactory compromise is perhaps to give the
instructions in the target language and to ask for their repetition in the students’ language
in order to ensure that everyone fully understands what to do.
- Co-operation among learners: Students, in pairs or groups, compare their answers to
grammatical exercises, comprehension tasks etc. in their own language (early levels).
Furthermore, on occasion the most lucid explanation or the clearest inductive
presentation by the teacher may fail for some students, when a mother tongue
explanation by a peer who has understood may well succeed.
- Discussions of classroom methodology (early levels): Effective teaching will involve
methodology (early some aspects which are unfamiliar and/or initially unacceptable to
some levels) students (pair and group work, for instance). It is clearly in the interest of all
concerned that the teacher be aware of the students’ reactions to what takes place in the
classroom, and learners have a right to express their views on this as clearly as possible.
- Presentation and reinforcement of language (mainly early stages): It can provide useful
reinforcement of structural, conceptual, and sociolinguistic differences between the native
and target languages (its aim is to improve accuracy). For most students of English there
are some aspects of the language which present difficulties principally because of the way
in which they differ structurally from the mother tongue. In such cases the most efficient
approach can be a simple explanation or demonstration of the rule, followed by a
translation exercise. Translation of a paragraph containing several ‘known’ false cognates
is another useful application of this technique, as it obliges students to focus on the
problem of a set of apparent but misleading similarities between the two languages.
- Checking for sense: Many students have a tendency to concentrate excessively on form at
the expense of meaning and context. So, translation, by the student, into the native
language of incoherent or nonsensical discourse which he or she has produced in the
target language can be useful to ensure that they have written nothing which would be
nonsensical in both languages.
- Testing: It will be argued that translation is unreliable as a testing technique since it does
not evaluate the learner’s performance in a ‘real’ linguistic activity. Atkinson states that if
learners perform well on a translation exercise, the content of which adequately probes
their structural and communicative competence in the target language, this does not
demonstrate an ability to use the language in a ‘real’ situation.

Development of useful learning strategies

Learners often need to be made aware of how much they in fact can do with the limited corpus of
language they possess. Developing the ability to use this corpus creatively is crucial to successful
language learning, yet many students do not realize this intuitively. Activities involving translation
from the mother tongue can help to remedy this problem in that they encourage students to make
the important step of beginning to think not in terms of ‘How does one say X in English?‘, but
rather ‘How can I express X in English?‘. I am referring here principally to activities which promote
the skills of circumlocution, paraphrase, explanation, and simplification. I have used them both
independently and in connection with specific fluency activities. Some brief examples:

Such strategies are not difficult to use, but many students do not employ them automatically,
frequently because of misconceptions concerning the importance of accuracy in language learning.
For this reason, their existence and their significance need to be made explicit in the classroom.

Dangers of overuse

It is obvious that in any situation excessive dependency on the mother tongue is to be avoided.
Otherwise some or all of the following problems may ensue:

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 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 are
quite capable of expressing what they mean.

4 Students fail to realize that during many activities in the classroom it is crucial that they use only
English.

Conclusion: What Atkinson have tried to argue here is that although the mother tongue is not a
suitable basis for a methodology, it has, at all levels, a variety of roles to play which are at present
consistently undervalued, for reasons which are for the most part suspect. He states that to ignore
the mother tongue in a monolingual classroom is almost certainly to teach with less than
maximum efficiency.

THE USE OF L1 BY HARBORD

I (Harbord) 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. These can be divided into three categories on the basis of
the teacher's objective in using L1:

1 facilitating teacher-student communication: If students are unfamiliar with a new approach, the
teacher who cannot or will not give an explanation in L1 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. The teacher should be
able to communicate the meaning of a structure unambiguously through alternative L2 strategies
such as time lines or concept questions. One also might question the usefulness of the teacher
explaining 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 interlanganguage to try to induce
rules.

2 facilitating teacher-student rapport

3 facilitating learning.