Overusing Mother Tongue in English Language Teaching

1. INTRODUCTIONFor many years, teaching crosslingually, i.e. using the students' mother tongue (in monolingual classes) as a learning aid, was discredited in favour of an through English (intralingual approach). However, there seems to have been a recent swing of the pendulum towards a more flexible proposal which still admits that the more is used in the classroom, the better but considers Ll as an important teaching/ learning tool. A good example of this is Mario Rinvolucri who used to be an advocate of the Direct Method, but now thinks that the students' mother tongue has an important role to play in foreign language instruction. Thus, the foreign language teaching field is dynamic and the mother tongue can be a useful instrument in the communicative foreign language classroom. For instance, where grammar is posing a conceptual difficulty, an illustration of a mother tongue equivalent can be helpful. Take the ways in which uses present tense simple, for example. Linking examples of each use of the present tense with the mother tongue equivalent can help learners understand how works. If the use of the mother tongue proves to be helpful in the class then both the teacher and the students will benefit from this. However, the mother tongue should be used only in certain situations. It is a good idea to agree a policy on its use together with the students at the beginning of the school year and decide when and why mother tongue will be used and by whom.When confronted with something new, whether it is a different kind of music, or just new information, it is a natural instinct to look for similarities with things that are familiar, to try and draw some comparison with what we already know. Consciously or unconsciously, we bring what we know to what we do not, making it impossible to learn anything entirely from scratch. This is certainly no less true when we set about learning a foreign language. In many cases teachers' explanations are in the students' mother tongue, a bilingual dictionary is consulted in the early stages, and even in the classroom using the most direct language-teaching methods, the learner will still, of necessity, conduct an internal dialogue or rationalisation in his native tongue. It is not possible to learn a foreign language without relying to some extent on your mother tongue, and the impulse to look for similarities and to draw conclusions based on them is as strong here as in any other learning context. This impulse will be stronger with the greater the incidence of apparent similarities. And the apparent similarities that exist between many of the languages of the world are innumerable. They are also in the eye of the beholder, since our individual perceptions of similarity are as individual as we are. In this respect, the overuse of the Ll in the L2 classroom might be prejudicial for the students' learning process.There are, of course, many other influences at play when we learn a foreign language, but the influence that the mother tongue has on the language we produce when we use a foreign language has become a very important area of study for people interested in second language acquisition, language teaching, ELT publishing, and language in general and is usually referred to as 'Language Interference', 'Transfer', or 'Cross-linguistic influence'. It is suggested that the language produced by foreign learners is so unavoidably influenced, and even distorted, by the mother tongue of the learner that it should rather be termed an 'Interlanguage' since it will always be a blend of the foreign language and the mother tongue. The better the learner is at overcoming language interference, the more dilute that blend will be.It is important for teachers to understand the errors their students make and to target their lessons to each student's individual needs. For the persons who come into contact with nonnative speakers of English, whether in the course of business or simply when travelling, awareness of the kinds of mistakes that learners make and why they make them will help towards mutual understanding. …