Humanising Language Teaching
Year 5; Issue 1; January 03

Using L.1 in the classroom

Lindsay Clanfield and Duncan Foord

[ Lindsay Clanfield and Duncan Foord are both teacher trainers at Oxford House College in Barcelona. This article orginally appeared in Issue 3 of it's for Teachers, www.its-teachers.com ]

Every language teacher at some point has felt guilty, puzzled and frustrated about their students' perceived overuse of their mother tongue in the classroom. In a monolingual context, that is to say where all students speak the same mother tongue (a classroom reality for the majority of language teachers), this perception can become quite a problem. The closest most get to dealing with the issue is to nag their students to “use English” and fine them for “lapsing” into mother tongue. There is nothing wrong with this strategy as far as it goes, but it rarely allows the teacher or the students a chance to understand why L1 was being used in the first place.

A more complete strategy however is to BE PROACTIVE! This means you, the teacher, should actively control and influence how and when the mother tongue IS used. Don't waste time trying to eliminate use of mother tongue completely from the classroom, when this is likely to be futile. Instead concentrate on ways of harnessing, exploiting and playing with L1. Decide when it might be beneficial to use L1 and why. This might include reading as well as speaking L1, as we will see below. Encourage and approve of mother tongue use at chosen moments and in designated activities. Explain your choices to your students if you think that would be helpful. If you can do this, your classroom is likely to be more authentic in the sense that it reflects the natural interplay of L1 and L2 which is inherent in second language acquisition. Not only more authentic, but more fun and more relaxing for you and your students. Still not convinced? Try some of these ideas. Most of them reflect ways students are likely to use English outside the classroom.

PRACTICAL IDEAS KIT

The ideas in this kit are all designed to be used with minimum preparation on the part of the teacher. They have been grouped according to the time the activity lasts. The recommended level of the students for each particular activity is written in brackets.

15 MINUTE ACTIVITIES

CONVERSATION STARTERS (pre-intermediate +)
Using mother tongue newspapers for conversation practice. Choose or get students to choose an article from today's newspaper and explain what it is about in English. Depending on the difficulty of the text this may generate vocabulary work as students work on communicating key points of the text to the teacher. This is similar to (but usually more effective than) just using pictures. The L1 text, like the picture is a fast way of stimulating ideas for conversation.

DUBBING (intermediate +)
Show students a clip of a popular mother tongue TV programme (e.g. a soap) and tell them they have been commissioned to dub it into English for the BBC. With larger classes get students to work in teams. The best version gets the contract! Students can work on translating the script and taking on the roles of the actors and literally dubbing with TV sound off.

FALSE FRIENDS WORDSEARCH/CROSSWORD PUZZLE (intermediate +) Prepare a series of sentences with a false friend in them. Write the sentence in English. Prepare a crossword puzzle (you can do this at www.puzzlemaker.com) with the correct words in English. Give the puzzle to the students and let them figure it out.

SHADOW OF A DOUBT (all levels)
Have students rehearse a communicative activity (shadow) in mother tongue before attempting it in English and then afterwards compare. This can be a very effective way of challenging Advanced learners, as it helps to raise specific awareness of the difference between their ability to express themselves in English and in the mother tongue (doubt).

10 MINUTE ACTIVITIES

SIGHT TRANSLATION (intermediate +)
Prepare a series of interesting quotations (for example, 10) on a piece of paper. You can find a collection of quotations at www.quoteland.com Show them to the students one by one (using an overhead projector would work nicely, otherwise write them on the board or prepare a piece of paper that students look at little by little). Give the students 30 seconds to read it, then take it away. They must each individually write what they understood but in their own language. Compare translations afterwards.
Variation: Take quotes from the news and ask them to imagine who said it.

REVERSE TRANSLATIONS (intermediate +)
Group A are given a short text in mother tongue to translate into English. Group B a similar length of text in English to translate into mother tongue. Groups then give their translations to each other to be translated back into the original. Finally groups compare the originals with the translated version.
Variation: Correcting translations. Prepare some literal and inaccurate translations for your students to correct. Ready-made examples can also be found in your local tourist office!

INTERPRETERS (all levels)
This can be adapted to any oral pairwork situation. It works best with interviews. Students work in groups of three (minimum). One person is the interviewer, and speaks only in English. The interviewee speaks only in L1. The interpreter works as a go-between, translating the interviewer's questions into L1 and the interviewee's answers back into English.
Variation: Arrange a press conference, with several interviewers. The interviewee plays the role of a famous film star, politician etc. Just like on TV! Teenagers especially like this activity and recognise the scenario from TV interviews with pop stars and sports personalities.

RESTAURANT ROLEPLAY (all levels)
Use a mother tongue menu so that natives have to explain the dishes to English speaking guests. This is after all a more likely scenario than the “Olde Englishe Restaurante” favoured by coursebooks.

TRANSLATING POP SONGS (intermediate +)
Students translate the lyrics (or small sections of the lyrics) of their favourite songs into the mother tongue. Teenage magazines sometimes include songs with mother tongue translations so you can use these to do it the other way round as well.

5 MINUTE ACTIVITIES

BROKEN TELEPHONE/TELEGRAM (all levels)
Devise a sentence that might cause translation problems into your students' L1. Whisper it to the first student in English. The first student translates it into L1 and whispers it to the second student, who translates it back into English and whispers it to the third. Go round the class in the same way. At the end, compare the final English version with the original.
Variation: Do the same exercise, but in writing. FUNNY NAMES (all levels)
Translate the following literally into the students' L1. So, for example George Bush becomes Jorge Arbusto in Spanish and Georges Buisson in French.

George Bush
Johnny Walker
Wall St.
Nicholas Cage
Johnson & Johnson
Louis Armstrong
The Doors
Johnny Cash
Bond, James Bond
Sting
Seven Up
Playboy magazine

Tell the students they are going to have a dictation of names of famous people, things and places. They will hear these names in their own language, but must write down what they are in English (in other words, they must get the names right). Give the dictation. How many names could the students get?

CODE SWITCHING (all levels)
This means using more than one language in an utterance. (“I'll have a cafe con leche”). Bilingual kids do this all the time so why shouldn't learners? On occasion, encourage learners to use mother tongue words or phrases in a communication activity to maintain fluency and build confidence. A listener can note down mother tongue use for later work if you want, but that's not necessarily the point.

ALTERNATIVES TO THE CARROT AND THE STICK
ENCOURAGING USE OF L2 IN CLASS

Of course the above ideas do not necessarily mean that it is okay to use L1 in class all the time and they do not address the frustrated question of the English teacher “How do I get them to speak more English?!”. Here are some suggestions to provide an alternative to pleading and nagging your students to SPEAK ENGLISH.

Grade speaking tasks and make aims and instructions clear. This may sound obvious but students' use of mother tongue is nine times out of ten due to the fact that they don't know what they are supposed to be doing, or they don't have sufficient English or sufficient communication strategies to do it in English.

Use a “talking stick” for class discussions. The person with the stick holds the floor, but must do it in English.

Correct students' use of L1in a correction slot. When your students are speaking, note down all examples of mother tongue you hear and write them on the board for students to render in English. This is a more constructive approach than nagging and fining.

Take advantage of L1 use by your students, especially when it is directed at you the teacher. If a student speaks to you in their mother tongue, acknowledge the CONTENT of their request, question or statement couched in L1 (in other words, acknowledge the desire to communicate) but follow up with a “How do you say that in English?” and make this a question the class as a whole can address. In this sense you are not punishing, you are being constructive again. Refer back to this when someone wants to use the same language in the future (“Do you remember how we say/ask this in English?)

Designate English time as distinct from mother tongue time. Use a symbol like a flag pinned up on the board. This will help reinforce when you want English spoken and when you are prepared to hear either English or mother tongue.

Finally, you can always nag, threaten and penalise L2 use outside designated times. Well...why not?