0

Should the mother tongue be used in language teaching?

asked 2015-04-25 02:45:45 -0400

Anonymous

Hi!

I teach English as a second language to high school students and I have always thought that I should use the English language only whenever I'm inside the classroom. However, I have recently read a study that says explanations should be in the mother tongue. I suppose this is true for beginners but how about for those who already have a basic knowledge on grammar?

Thank you very much for responding to this.

~ John Lour Flores :)

edit retag flag offensive close merge delete

2 answers

Sort by » oldest newest most voted

0

answered 2015-04-25 03:45:38 -0400

MaBo
1

Hi! This is not an easy one to answer. Not everybody in the class will have the same degree of grammatical understanding. I, personally, would explain new grammatical phenomena or vocabulary in simple L2 terms but summarise (or ask a student to summarise) them in the L1, too. This is an aide to weaker students and a reassurance for the better ones. I found this work by Ernesto Macaro very helpful: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.2307...

Regards, MaBo

edit flag offensive delete link

Login/Signup to Answer

Question Tools

1 follower

Stats

Asked: 2015-04-25 02:45:45 -0400

Seen: 700 times

Last updated: Dec 11 '15

(C) 2015 by The LINGUIST List and Contributors
Content on this site is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Powered by Askbot version 0.10.2