Using Mother Tongue in the Classroom of English as a Foreign Language

Research proposal

By Ibrahim Katlo

2nd year student of MA(TEOSL)

English and Foreign Languages University

THE MOTHER TONGUE IN The CLASSROOM of English as a Foreign Language

Abstract

The role of the mother tongue in instructed foreign language learning has been the subject of much debate and controversy. This article reports on a piece of research carried out in my own teaching/learning environment (government schools, Syria) and presents a comparative study of students’, teachers’ and teacher educators’ perceptions regarding the adequacy of cross-linguistic grammatical comparisons in the monolingual classroom. This in turn may help students to notice the gap between the state of their inner grammars and the target language and ultimately aid acquisition.

Introduction

Throughout much of the history of research into foreign language acquisition, the

role of learners’ first language (L1) has been a hotly debated issue. This is especially because students and teachers usually share the same mother tongue, Prodromou (2000) refers to the mother tongue as a ‘skeleton in the closet’, while Gabrielatos (2001) calls it a ‘bone of contention’.

Intuitively, a good number of teachers feel, partly based on their own experiences as learners of a foreign language, that the mother tongue has an active and beneficial role to play in instructed foreign language acquisition/learning. In the literature, an increasing number of teacher-researchers stress the growing methodological need in TEFL/TESOL for a principled, systematic and judicious way of using the mother tongue in the classroom. This methodological need has mere reflection in the field of teaching the language. And yet, for some of us, there seems to be a generalized feeling of guilt that we are acting counter to the principles of good teaching when we use the learners’ mother tongue as a tool to facilitate learning.

In my opinion using mother tongue is desirable when it’s inevitable, helpful and quicker. Therefore avoiding using mother tongue is not recommended because a student sometimes thinks in his/her mother tongue. That is naturally we can’t avoid it.

One of the first and main advocates of mother tongue use in the communicative

classroom has been David Atkinson (1987 and 1993). Atkinson points out the

methodological gap in the literature concerning the use of the mother tongue and argues a case in favor of its restricted and principled use mainly in accuracy-oriented tasks. His views, however, are reflections of his own personal experience as a teacher and not the result of measures of comparative achievements of students taught in different ways or of perception-based surveys.

There has been very little research done on what use of L1 is actually made in practice in the classroom and what the perceptions are of students, teachers and teacher educators on this subject. We will now turn briefly to two pieces of research in these under-researched areas.

My project will focus on Arabic language and how it used in teaching English as a foreign language in my country Syria which is considered as a monolingual country.

Statement of problems:

Arabic language is still used randomly in the foreign language classroom in explanation of instructions and communications. This using of the mother tongue brings

The research aim:

As part of my MA project (2012) I carried out: 1) teacher’s beliefs about using mother tongue in the classroom and 2) the time taken by an English teacher using it during the class in Syria.

Significance of the research:

I’m doing this project to look for the problems which might encounter teachers when they teach, and I expect that it benefit them to promote learning process in the government schools in Syria.