The mother tongue in the classroom: a neglected resource?

David Atkinson

The role of the mother tongue in monolingual classes is a topic which is often ignored in discussions of methodology and in teacher training. In this article I suggest some of the reasons for this neglect and describe a variety of applications of the learners’ first language (11) in the classroom, with particular reference to the role which activities based on translation can play in fluency development. I contend that the potential of the mother tongue as a classroom resource is so great that its role should merit considerable attention and discussion in any attempt to develop a ‘post- communicative’ approach to TEFL for adolescents and adults.

Introduction In his article ‘A Critical Look at the Communicative Approach’ (1985), Michael Swan makes the point that the mind of the learner as he or she enters the classroom is not a ‘tabula rasa’. But although Swan deals in detail with some aspects of the communicative abilities and knowledge of the world which all learners possess, he makes only a relatively brief mention of the actual corpus of language (their mother tongue) which all learners bring into the classroom. If Swan is right in asserting that the ‘communicative approach’ needs considerable reassessment, then I would contend that one major aspect of methodology that should be included in this reassessment is the role (if any) of the learners’ native language in the classroom.

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. The impli- cation, one assumes, is often that it has no role to play. It is true that total prohibition of the students’ native language is now unfashionable, but the potential of its use in the classroom clearly needs further exploration.1 If one examines, for example, introductory courses in TEFL, this lack of attention becomes immediately apparent. Hubbard et al. (1983), in a course designed for non-native speaking teachers, ignore it entirely, as does Haycraft (1978). Harmer (1983) makes four passing references to it, and the majority of Gower and Walters’ (1983) references to it caution against its overuse. And perhaps not surprisingly, the issue is ignored in many of the ‘humanis- tic’ volumes, for example Moskovitz (1978) and Stevick (1980).2

This gap in methodological literature is presumably partly responsible for the uneasiness which many teachers, experienced and inexperienced, feel about using or permitting the use of the students’ native language in the classroom.

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Causes of the The reasons for this lack of attention seem to me to be principally ones present situation which do not bear much scrutiny. It is perhaps possible to identify four

which are particularly influential:

1 The association of translation with the grammar/translation method, which is even today often treated either as a joke (‘Remember how we learned languages at school?‘) or as the whipping boy of EFL. But I feel that the worst excesses of the direct method in its 1960s form should serve as a reminder that its total rejection of translation and all that it implied was clearly a case in which the baby was indeed thrown out with the bathwater.

2 A backwash effect whereby native speakers, who often enjoy a dispropor- tionate degree of status in language-teaching institutions, have often them- selves been trained in an environment where the trainer (also a native speaker and perhaps a monoglot) focuses mainly or exclusively on the relatively unrepresentative situation of a native speaker teaching a multi- lingual class in Britain or the USA.

3 The recent influence of Krashen (1981 and passim) and his associates (for example, Burt and Dulay 1975 and passim) 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.3

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. My inten- tion is to argue 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 It is not difficult to think of several general advantages of judicious use of advantages of the mother tongue. The most significant of these is presumably that trans-

mother-tongue use lation techniques form a part of the preferred learning strategies of most learners in most places, the importance of which should not be under- estimated. It is a commonplace to say that little is known about what constitutes effective language learning, yet it is not unusual to discover among teachers the assumption that students are not in a position to judge what is best for them; this is the teacher’s job. The customers may not always be right, but it does seem that there is a tendency in EFL to opt for methods and techniques which are ‘exotic’ and ‘modern’ or which demon- strate specialized knowledge possessed by the teacher in order tojustify our status as professionals, often as a reaction to the rather uncomfortable feeling engendered by an awareness of how little more we really do know about learning than our students.

In any event, prejudice is not a satisfactory reason for prohibiting students from engaging in learning activities in which they may well have more faith than other more ‘communicative’, ‘affective’, or ‘humanistic’ approaches. Common sense suggests that a belief in the way one approaches a task is likely to affect one’s chances of success. Bolitho ( 1983) points out that another important role of the mother tongue is to allow 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.

Furthermore, techniques involving use of the mother tongue can be very efficient as regards the amount of time needed to achieve a specific aim, if

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Some uses of the mother tongue

Eliciting language (all levels)

Checking comprehension (all

levels)

Giving instructions (early levels)

Co-operation among learners

only because in general, such techniques need the help of only a black- board. And assuming that the teacher (especially the hard-pressed teacher) either shares the native language of the students or has sufficient compe- tence in it, many of the techniques involve little preparation.

Over a period of ten months of teaching monolingual classes, principally students who have had between 0 and 200 hours of English, I have exploited the mother tongue on an experimental basis for various purposes. What follows is a description of the principal techniques and activities which I have found useful.

For example, ‘How do you say X in English?‘. This can often be less time- consuming and can involve less potential ambiguity than other methods of eliciting such as visuals, mime, ‘creating a need’, etc.

The mother tongue can be used to check comprehension of the concept behind a structure, e.g. ‘How do you say “I’ve been waiting for ten minutes” in Spanish?‘. This technique encourages students to develop the ability to distinguish between ‘structural, semantic and pragmatic’ equiv- alence (Widdowson 1974, quoted in Brumfit and Johnson 1979:65) and as such is particularly useful. In monolingual classes it is often more foolproof and quicker than more ‘inductive’ checking techniques developed specific- ally for use in multilingual classes, for example ‘concept questions’.

The mother tongue can also be used to check comprehension of a listening or reading text. If one accepts that decoding and recoding are to some extent independent processes, then 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.

Although it is true that explaining an activity in the target language is ‘genuine communication’, at very low levels (say 150 hours of English or less) this advantage must be weighed against the fact that for instance 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.

Students, in pairs or groups, compare their answers to grammatical exer- cises, comprehension tasks etc. in their own language (early levels). For example, if the teacher’s aim is to lead the students to an understanding of a specific structure, then this activity does not involve the added burden, over and above understanding the structure, of following the metalanguage used to explain it. 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.

The mother tongue in the classroom 243

Discussions of Despite the point made earlier concerning the importance of students’ classroom preferred learning strategies, it is likely that 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. For this reason discussions of methodology at early levels are best conducted either in a mixture of both languages or exclusively in the students’ mother tongue.

Presentation and An exercise involving translation into the target language of a paragraph or reinforcement of set of sentences which highlight a recently taught language item can

language (mainly early provide useful reinforcement of structural, conceptual, and sociolinguistic levels) differences between the native and target languages. This activity is not, of

course, ‘communicative’, but like many of the other activities described here, its aim is to improve accuracy; in my opinion, a communicative element comes into its own in fluency activities.

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, for example, subject + verb + person + infinitive (e.g. He asked them to help him) for speakers of Romance languages which use a subjunctive structure; the position of auxiliaries in subordinate clauses for German speakers; demonstrative adjective + noun construc- tions for Greek beginners (the difficulty here being the absence of the definite article); and so on. 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 cog- nates 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. I would reiterate that these are accuracy activities, and I am not trying to suggest that they can in any way ‘replace’ a sufficient number of fluency activities in the classroom; they could, how- ever, complement them.

Checking for sense Translation, by the student, into the native language of incoherent or nonsensical discourse which he or she has produced in the target language. Particularly when writing compositions or doing gap-fill/cloze exercises, many students have a tendency to concentrate excessively on form at the expense of meaning and context. Clearly, in the case of real nonsense, the only answer to the question ‘Why is this wrong?’ is ‘Because it doesn’t make sense’, which is precisely what the learner cannot see. I have found it useful to encourage students to do a quick mental translation of a composition or gap-fill exercise as a checking technique to ensure that they have written nothing which would be nonsensical in both languages.

Testing I believe that the use of the mother tongue has considerable application in testing, in that it can help to maximize the validity and reliability of many types of tests; there is undoubtedly a sense in which it is true that transla- tion is ‘the supreme test of knowledge of two languages’ (Cunningham 1929). 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. In my opinion this is doubtful and anyway, even if it is true, it is difficult to believe that if learners perform well on a translation exercise, the

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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 Most teachers would agree that very many students (up to quite advanced learning strategies levels), when confronted with a fluency activity (a discussion, a role play,

etc.) are often frustrated in their attempts to communicate. This is due to an inefficient approach to the task, which consists of beginning by translating word for word or phrase by phrase until, very quickly, they come to a lexical item or use of a structure that they ‘don’t know’ in English. The most frequent reactions at this point appear to be either to revert to the mother tongue, to appeal to the teacher (‘How do you say X in English?‘) or to dry up, all of which would be less than satisfactory in a real communication situation. The frequent response to this problem on the part of the teacher, to admonish the students to ‘think in English’, is of little help. Thinking in English may be the ideal long-term goal, but in the meantime students need to be encouraged to develop communication strategies which, with time, will become semi-automatic. By the same token, 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. Activi- ties 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. (In the latter case students’ questions during an activity along the lines of ‘How do you say X in English?’ are not answered immediately, but thrown back to them after the activity, and they are required, in pairs or groups, to find a way ofexpressing their meaning within the limits of their competence in the target language.) Some brief examples:

Student wished to express English used Strategy

vivo (alive) Rechazaron la propuesta (they

rejected the proposal) Es muy culto (he’s very

cultured) Fue vergonzoso (It was

disgraceful) en cambio (on the other

hand) El agua está muy contaminada

(the water is very polluted)

Inauguraron el edificio (the building was inaugurated)

Se mostró reacio (He appeared reluctant)

not dead they did not accept

the proposal he’s very polite

It was terrible

but

The water is very dirty

They opened the building

He didn’t want to do it

negated antonym negated antonym

simplification/approx. synonym

simplification/approx. synonym

simplification/approx. synonym

simplification/approx. synonym

simplification/approx. synonym

circumlocution

The mother tongue in the classroom 245

Le despidieron (He was sacked)

El precio del viaje se compensa por lo barata que es la vida (The low cost of living compensates for the high price of the ticket)

pulpo (octopus)

Comimos chuletas (we had chops for lunch)

He lost his job circumlocution

The ticket’s simplification expensive but life’s cheap there

It lives in the sea, explanation it’s got eight legs

none: Student gesture/ostentation points to relevant part of the body

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 exis- tence and their significance need to be made explicit in the classroom.

In a similar way, translation can be used to promote guessing strategies (in this respect another frequent misconception needs to be overcome, i.e. that guessing is in some sense tantamount to ‘cheating’). This complements the type of exercise described above, in that as opposed to encouraging students to ‘make do’ with the corpus of language they possess at any given level, the teacher invites them to expand that corpus autonomously. For example, guessing true cognates, an exercise which involves translation of a group of words, some ‘known’ false cognates and some ‘unknown’ true cognates, both revises previously learned items and gives students the satisfaction of expanding their vocabulary ‘by themselves’.

Another related activity consists of exercises in which students, on the basis of their (ever increasing) knowledge of patterns of affixes in English, make informed guesses as to correct translations of lexical items. The exercises help students to develop confidence in guessing, and actual work done on affixes increases their chances of guessing correctly outside the classroom. I have found that using translation as a basis for this type of exercise, rather than tasks such as ‘make negative nouns from the following words’, is more motivating and gives students a greater sense of accomplishment.

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.

These are not dangers to be shrugged off lightly. Furthermore, in the case of

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native-speaking teachers of English there are the added risks of teachers believing that their knowledge of the students’ language is considerably better than in fact it is, and/or of using the classroom as a stage on which to practise or show off their command of the students’ language.

Conclusion What I 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. I feel that to ignore the mother tongue in a mono- lingual classroom is almost certainly to teach with less than maximum efficiency.4 q Received February 1987

Notes 1 It is not, of course, true that the role of the mother

tongue has been entirely ignored in recent years. See, for example, Edge (1986) or Thomas (1984) on using translation at advanced levels.

2 There is, in fact, one brief reference to translation in Stevick’s book (p.47), when ‘The Silent Way’ is described.

3 For a critique of the ‘strong form’ of Krashen’s theory, see, for example, Brumfit (1984), or, for its methodological implications, Littlewood (1984).

4 I would like to acknowledge the comments made on this article by Brian Brownlee and Roy Pearse.

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Approach.’ ELT Journal 39/1:2-l2 and 39/2:76-87. Thomas, H. 1984. ‘Developing the stylistic and lexical

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The author David Atkinson has taught EFL and trained teachers in Portugal, Greece, Mexico, and Britain. At present he works at the British Institute, Palma de Mallorca.

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