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

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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 (L1) 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 ol. (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.

ELTJournal Volume 4114 October 1987 © Oxford Vrastnity Pros 1987 241
 Causm of thm The reasons for this lack of attention seem to me to be principally ones
pnsmnt 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-

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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 litde
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.

It is not difficult to think of several general advantages ofjudicious use of

mdvmntagoMof the mother tongue. The most significant of these is presumably that trans-
mothtr-tongum uam 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 litde 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 to justify 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 odier 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
242 David Atkinson
 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.

Somm lisas of the Over a period of ten months of teaching monolingual classes, principally
mothmr tongue 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.

Eliciting language (all For example, 'How do you say X in English?'. This can often be less time-
levels) consuming and can involve less potential ambiguity than other methods of

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eliciting such as visuals, mime, 'creating a need', etc.

Checking The mother tongue can be used to check comprehension of the concept
comprehension (all behind a structure, e.g. 'How do you say "I've been waiting for ten
levels) 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.

Giving instructions Although it is true that explaining an activity in the target language is
(early levels) '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.

Co-operation among Students, in pairs or groups, compare their answers to grammatical exer-
learners 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 arightto 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

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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

244 David Atkinson

 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

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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 specificfluencyactivities.
(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 of expressing their meaning within the limits of their competence
in the target language.) Some brief examples:
Student wished to express English used Strategy
vivo (alive) not dead negated antonym
RechazflTon la propuesta (they they did not accept negated antonym
rejected the proposal) the proposal
Es muy culto (he's very he's very polite simpUfication/approx.
cultured) synonym
Fue vergonzoso (It was It was terrible simplification/approx.
disgraceful) synonym
en cambio (on the other but simplification/approx.
hand) synonym
El agua estd muy contaminada The water is very simplification/approx.
(the water is very dirty synonym
polluted)
Inauguraron el edificio (the They opened the simplification/approx.
building was building synonym
inaugurated)
Se mostro reacio (He He didn't want to circumlocution
appeared reluctant) doit
The mothtr tongue in tht classroom 245
 Le despidieron (He was He lost his job circumlocution
sacked)
El precio del viaje se compensa The ticket's simplification
por lo baraia que es la vida expensive but
(The low cost of living life's cheap there
compensates for the high
price of the ticket)
pulpo (octopus) It lives in the sea, explanation
it's got eight legs
Commas chulelas (we had none: Student gesture/ostentation
chops for lunch) points to
relevant part of
the body
Such strategies are not difficult to use, but many students do not employ

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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' fake 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 ornnm 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 offlightly. Furthermore, in the case of

246 David Atkinson

 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 basb for a methodology, it has, at all levek, 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 D
Received February 1987

Gower, R. and S. Walter*. 1983. A Ttaching Practice

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1 It is not, of course, true that the role of the motherHandbook. London: Heinemann.
tongue has been entirely ignored in recent years. Hanner.J. 1983. The Practice ofEnglish Language Ttach-
See, for example, Edge (1986) or Thomas (1984) on ing. London: Longman.
using translation at advanced levels. Haycraft, J. 1978. An Introduction to English Languagt
Ttaching. London: Longman.
2 There is, in fact, one brief reference to translation in
Stevick's book (p.47), when 'The Silent Way' is Hubbard, P., H. Jones, B. Thornton, and R.
described. Wheeler. 1983. A Training Course For TEFL. Oxford:
S For a critique of the 'strong form' of Krashen's Oxford University Press.
Krashen,S. 1981. Second Language Acquisition and Second
theory, see, for example, Brumfit (1984), or, for its
methodological implications, litdewood (1984). Languagt Learning. Oxford: Pergamon.
4 I would like to acknowledge the comments made on Iitdewood, W. 1984. Review of The Natural Approach
this article by Brian Brownlee and Roy Pearse. (Krashen and Terrell). ELT Journal 38/3:217-8.
Moskovitz, G. 1978. Caring and Sharing in the Foreign
Language Classroom. Rowley, MA: Newbury House.
Rsfaranca* Stevick, E. 1980. Teaching English: A Way And Ways.
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guagi Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Thomas, H. 1984. 'Developing the stylistic and lexical
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Bart, M. K. and H. C. Dulay (eds.) 1975. New 38/3:187-91.
Directions in Second Language Learning, Teaching andWiddowson, H. G. 1974. T h e deep structure of dis-
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The mother tongue in the classroom 247