Should teachers use students’ own language in the classroom?
Academia | Cambridge University
It is beyond the ability of anyone to banish totally the learners’ own language from a foreign language learning experience. Learning is, by definition, built upon previous learning, and the most significant resource that learners can bring to the language learning task is their existing linguistic knowledge – a substantial portion of which consists of knowledge about their own language. Learning is scaffolded, and, especially in the early stages of learning another language, it will be scaffolded, in part, on the language(s) they already know.
Whilst teachers can, perhaps, control the language their students speak, they cannot force them to think in the target language. Furthermore, the use of some translation techniques is one of the preferred learning strategies of most learners in most places. Like it or not, translating won’t go away. It makes more sense for a teacher to use translation in a principled, overt way than to pretend that the students are not using it covertly.
There are a number of very powerful reasons why the use of the students’ own language in the language classroom should not only be tolerated, but, at times, actively encouraged.
Evidence from both cognitive linguistics and neuroscience point strongly towards a role for the students’ own language in the language classroom. In fact, Henry Widdowson and others have argued that the neglect of translation has little to do with pedagogical principles or scientific research.
New knowledge is constructed on a base of old knowledge. As long ago as 1934, Lev Vygotsky wrote that learning a new language necessarily involves the use of one’s own language ‘as a mediator between the world of objects and the new language’. Neuroscience confirms that the initial acquisition of new words in a foreign language depends on the association of these items with corresponding own-language items in the learner’s memory. It is commonly believed that the use of translation activities in the classroom can lead to ‘negative transfer’, where the learner falsely assumes an equivalence between corresponding forms in two languages (e.g. false friends). In the case of English and any other language, there are likely to be many more true ‘friends’ than false ones. In the case of all languages, it is probably the case that the best and most efficient way to deal with ‘negative transfer’ is to compare the two languages directly.
A direct contrast between English and the learner’s own language may also pay dividends in the study of grammar. Some aspects of the grammar of one’s own language (e.g. word order) can be very hard to shake off when learning another language. Conscious awareness of what these are can help learners make progress in these areas. Translation is likely to be the most unambiguous and efficient way of achieving this awareness.
