The use of the mother tongue

in the classroom
John Harbord
Teachers and trainers who work with non-native-speaker colleagues will be
aware of frequent differences of opinion over the question of whether or
not to use the students' mother tongue in the classroom. With the
expansion of ELT in Eastern Europe, this question is becoming
progressively more of a stumbling block to co-operation between local

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teachers and those sent from Britain. This article seeks to look at various
ways in which teachers at the chalkface use L 7 and what theoretical view of
language learning (if any) motivates them to do so, as well as to compare
these with some alternative techniques using the target language.

Background The idea of avoiding the mother tongue in language teaching dates from
around the turn of the century, with the appearance of the direct method.
The development of ELT as a casual career for young people visiting
Europe encouraged teachers to make a virtue of the necessity of using
only English. Added to this, the subsequent growth of a British-based
teacher training movement out of the need to provide training for teachers
working with multilingual classes served to reinforce the strategy of
mother tongue avoidance.
Over the years, the effect of this on those non-native speakers who make
up the vast majority of language teachers has been to make them feel
either defensive or guilty at their inability to 'match up' to native speakers
in terms of conducting a class entirely in English. Many may have tried to
switch to an 'all-English classroom', only tofindthemselves inadequately
equipped with L2 strategies with which to get their meaning across; faced
with student incomprehension and resentment at this new game, they
revert to use of the mother tongue.
At the same time, however, there has been a movement in certain parts of
the world in reaction to an influx of unqualified native speakers whose
only object was to earn enough money to keep them in comfort until they
moved on to their next destination. As a consequence, schools or
companies in some countries have shied away from employing native
speakers, whether qualified or not, on the grounds that their ignorance of
the students' mother tongue renders them incapable of explaining the
system of the language to the students.

Some arguments Atkinson (1987: 422), in his discussion of mother tongue use in EFL,
for using the offers three reasons for allowing limited LI use in the classroom:
mother tongue
It is a 'learner-preferred strategy'. Given the opportunity, learners will
1: A learner-
preferred strategy
choose to translate without encouragement from the teacher. (Though
it is worth noting that research by Del Mar et al. (1982) suggests that
350 ELT Journal Volume 4614 October 1992© Oxford University Press 1992
 this is only true of beginner and pre-intermediate students.) Danchev
(1982) argues similarly and rather more convincingly that translation/
transfer is a natural phenomenon and an inevitable part of second
language acquisition even where no formal classroom learning occurs.
Learners will inevitably (and even unconsciously) attempt to equate a
target language structure or lexical item with its closest or most
common correlate in the mother tongue, regardless of whether or not
the teacher offers or 'permits' translation. He argues therefore that
methodology should attempt to work with this natural tendency rather
than against it. This is not a call for extensive LI use, as Danchev
himself has agreed,1 but rather a justification for its limited use in
certain situations.

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2: A humanistic To let students use their mother tongue is a humanistic approach in that
approach it permits them to say what they want. This appears a reasonable
enough point and few teachers would refuse to help a student who
asked, for example, 'How can I say "£a m'est e'gal"?'. Indeed, many
contemporary course books make regular use of such strategies. Even
so, this is hardly advocating a major return to LI use in the classroom,
and most writers would probably agree that as far as possible the
students should try to explain what they want to say in English.

3: An efficient use LI strategies are efficient in terms of time spent explaining. This is
of time certainly the reason most commonly given by teachers who advocate
LI use in the classroom, and it will be discussed in detail below.

Some While teachers and theorists may disagree about the role of mother tongue
considerations strategies in the classroom, most agree that, in the interests of the
regarding use of development of language as a communicative tool, communication in the
the target classroom should take place as far as possible in English. Atkinson (1987:
language 426), although generally in favour of LI use, warns that excessive
dependency is likely to result in some or all of the following:
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 the 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 quite capable of expressing what they mean.
4 Students fail to realize that during many activities in the classroom it
is essential that they use only English.
If proponents of task-based teaching such as Prabhu (1987) and Willis
(1990) are right, it is not so much what the teacher chooses to isolate and
explain in the way of grammar that the students will pick up but the
language the teacher uses in negotiating meaning with the students:
giving instructions, checking meaning, and so on. If such is the case, there
will need to be appreciable advantages to be gained from using the mother
Mother tongue in the classroom 351
 tongue in order for these to outweigh the disadvantage of the loss of this
authentic transaction. I 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.2 These can be
divided into three categories on the basis of the teacher's objective in
using LI:
1 facilitating teacher-student communication
2 facilitating teacher-student rapport

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3 facilitating learning.

Using L1 to This is the largest of the three categories in that it contains not only
facilitate 'message-getting-across' strategies, but also time-saving strategies.
communication Atkinson (1987) gives time-saving as one of his principle arguments in
favour of using LI and, at a practical level, the most frequent justification
given by teachers for LI use is that time saved by communicating in the
mother tongue can be used for more productive activities. Table 1 gives a
list of strategies which are principally communication facilitative.

Table 1: Group A
Group strategies • Discussion of classroom methodology during the early stages of a course.
• Explaining the meaning of a grammatical item (e.g. a verb tense) at the time of
presentation, especially when a correlate structure does not exist in L1.
• Giving instructions for a task to be carried out by the students.
• Asking or giving administrative information such as timetable changes, etc., or
allowing students to ask or answer these in L1.
• Checking comprehension of a listening or reading text.
Group B
• Explaining the meaning of a word by translation.
• Checking comprehension of structure, e.g. 'How do you say "I've been waiting
for ten minutes" in (L1)?'
• Allowing or inviting students to give a translation of a word as a
comprehension check.
• Eliciting vocabulary by giving the L1 equivalent.
Group C
• LI explanations by students to peers who have not understood.
• Giving individual help to a weaker student, e.g. during individual or pair work.
• Student-student comparison or discussion of work done.

Group A strategies Group A strategies are of the type that are likely to involve fairly extended
LI teacher or teacher-student discussion. They are therefore suspect
strategies unless they offer considerable benefits otherwise not available
to the class. In discussing methodology the possible benefits would
indeed seem to be the prime consideration: if students are unfamiliar with
a new approach, the teacher who cannot or will not give an explanation in
LI 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.
352 John Harbord
 Most often, teachers resort to LI to explain grammar because they feel
that L2 explanation is too complicated, and may even feel themselves
incapable of giving a clear and unambiguous explanation of the structure
in question exclusively in English.
This may often be due to inadequate training in alternative L2 strategies
such as 'time lines' or 'concept questions' with which, having prepared in
advance, the teacher should be able to communicate the meaning of a
structure unambiguously without recourse to the mother tongue. In the
light of contemporary methodology one might also question the
usefulness of the teacher talking to the students at length about 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

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interlanguage to try to induce rules.
By the same token, giving instructions for a task is one of the most
genuine opportunities for teacher-student communication in the
classroom. As mentioned earlier, the most recent developments in theory
suggest that this is an important source of language for student
acquisition. To sacrifice this, as Atkinson suggests, in order to be able to
set up complicated communicative interaction activities, would seem to
be counter-productive. If the teacher feels that a complex activity might
reap benefits outweighing the drawbacks of time devoted to explanation,
one viable L2 strategy might be to make a language learning activity out
of the instructions themselves (e.g. a text with comprehension questions).
The subsequent activity would then become a valid test of comprehension
of the task involving the instructions.
Dealing with class administration in LI is a strategy usually mentioned by
non-native speakers who feel unable to maintain the convention of L2
communication outside the context of the language lesson proper.
Whether this is because of unsympathetic attitudes of colleagues or
students, it seems an unfortunate decision which is likely to reflect
negatively on the status of English as a means of communication.
However, it is difficult to offer any help in this matter except to encourage
the teacher to persevere in the hope that students will become used to
using L2.
The final strategy in group A, of using LI for checking listening or
reading skills, seems once again a decision to throw out a valid
opportunity for communication in order to save time, and cannot really be
recommended on any grounds.3

Group B strategies The strategies in group B all rely on translation as a time-saving device.
As such, they must be evaluated critically as to the extent to which they
invoke Atkinson's consequences one and two. Most involve single lexical
items translated out of context and, while the teacher will obviously take
care not to use such strategies where there is a risk of ambiguity or where
one-to-one translation is not possible, their combined use would seem
highly likely to give students the impression that word-for-word
translation is a useful technique. Obviously these strategies are not being
Mother tongue in the classroom 353
 proscribed utterly, but it would seem advisable to use an alternative L2
strategy wherever possible. Some effective target language strategies
(despite a somewhat dismissive treatment by Atkinson) are visual
prompts, mime, and evoking situational context to create a need for the
item in question (for eliciting), together with paraphrase, definition, and
multiple exemplification. Surreptitious use of the third strategy listed
(allowing students to give a translation as a comprehension check) has
been cited as effective by many teachers and has also been used by the
author without students becoming dependent on translation.

Group C strategies Group C strategies may all set a precedent for LI communication in the
classroom. The first (explanations by students to peers who have not

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understood) is certainly a habit that in most cases will occur without
encouragement from the teacher. By focusing on certain students as weak
and therefore deserving of special treatment, the first and second
strategies may also consolidate a class hierarchy which has a negative
effect on those weaker students by reinforcing their reliance on the mother
tongue. Asking students to compare or discuss their work, on the other
hand, is an extremely valuable activity that fosters both student co-
operation and independence of thought. The advantages of such activities
are so great that at lower levels it will be more beneficial to allow students
to do this thoroughly in LI than to do it tokenistically in L2 or not at all.

Using L1 to This is a fairly minor category and only a few teachers admit to using LI
facilitate teacher- for this purpose. Again it should be emphasized that, while good group
student dynamics may facilitate learning, this may also be achieved using L2
relationships strategies, and it is the choice of LI for this purpose that is under
discussion. The following strategies have been mentioned:
—chatting in LI before the start of the lesson to reduce student anxiety;
—telling jokes in LI.
Once again, these are likely to have a fairly negative effect on the overall
tendency towards L2 use in the classroom. Lowering student anxiety and
achieving a good teacher-student rapport are very desirable aims and
greatly to be encouraged: but when many effective L2 strategies are
available to the teacher, the advantages of LI use for this purpose would
seem to be outweighed by the potential dangers. Alternative strategies
might include telling simple jokes or chatting to the students in L2 before
the lesson or during breaks, and being prepared to reveal as much personal
information about oneself as one asks of the students.

Using L1 to This final category will be concerned principally with the evaluation of
facilitate learning strategies which aim specifically at aiding L2 acquisition through
ofL2 comparison with LI. These strategies have two purposes: the first is to
make students aware of the dangers of translation and teach them to
exercise a conscious check on the validity of their unconscious
translation; and the second is to teach them ways of working towards what
Danchev (1982: 55) calls 'functional translation' (i.e. transferring
meaning into L2) rather than the word-for-word translation that occurs
354 John Harbord
 when the learner's unconscious need to make assumptions and
correlations between languages is ignored.
One of the best sources of ideas in this area is Duff (1989), who
recommends the use of exercises involving the translation of single words
or phrases in context (1989: 51). This is a crucial difference that
distinguishes Duff's work from the time-saving strategies mentioned
earlier. Whereas translation out of context encourages students to
translate word for word, translation within a specific context, by contrast,
makes them more fully aware of the problems of single-word translation.
The object here is not to save time, but to use it effectively to help students
to understand that what works in their mother tongue may not work in
English. One experimental technique of a similar nature I have used in

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teaching is to give students a text in the mother tongue with selected
words or phrases in English. This may serve as a vocabulary pre-teaching
exercise or equally as a revision activity.

Conclusion Perhaps the most important point to be made in the discussion on the
rights and wrongs of using the mother tongue in the classroom is that
translation, and indeed use of the mother tongue generally, is not a device
to be used to save time for 'more useful' activities, nor to make life easier
for the teacher or the students. Instead, as Duff says, it should be used to
provoke discussion and speculation, to develop clarity and flexibility of
thinking, and to help us increase our own and our students' awareness of
the inevitable interaction between the mother tongue and the target
language that occurs during any type of language acquisition.
Received February 1992

Notes classroom: a neglected resource?'. ELT Journal

1 Personal communication.
2 Strategies given here are from a list of mother-
tongue strategies encountered by the author in
teacher training and through discussion with
colleagues. Several of these are also cited by
Atkinson (1987:423) as having been chosen from
a larger sample (not listed) as 'useful techniques'
on the basis of a ten-month experimental period
with students who had studied between 0 and 200
hours of English.
3 Although this strategy is suggested by Atkinson as
one of the techniques he has found useful in
teaching low-level students, the author has never
encountered teachers who have advocated its use,
and even those who favour LI use have generally
rejected it as being counter-productive.
References
Atkinson, D. 1987. 'The mother tongue in the
Mother tongue in the classroom
41/4.
Danchev, A. 1982. 'Transfer and Translation'.
Finnlance 2: 39-61.
Del-Mar, M., M. Viano, and V. Orquin. 1982.
'Identifying our students' strategies for learning
EFL'. Modern English Teacher. 9/4.
Duff, A. 1989. Translation. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Prabhu, N. S. 1987. Second Language Pedagogy.
Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Willis, D. 1990. The Lexical Syllabus. London:
Collins ELT.
The author
John Harbord has worked in Hungary, Bulgaria,
Estonia, Finland, and Turkey as a teacher, trainer, and
director of studies. He is currently working as a
director of studies of a language school in Bmo,
Czechoslovakia.
355