Wolfgang Butzkamm

The doggedness of dogma

The experts as a whole, however, reacted sceptically. The Anglo-American mainstream simply moved on. Many young native speakers from anglophone countries have spilled out into the world and made a living teaching English. Most of them teach their own language – at least, at first – without any relation to the culture and language of their pupils. Famous exceptions include the “greats” in our field: Harold Palmer in Japan, Michael West in India or, notably, Anthony Burgess in Malaysia. “One cannot but suspect that this theory of rigid avoidance of the mother tongue may be in part motivated by the fact that the teacher of English does perhaps not know the learner’s mother tongue”, argues West (1962: 48). This “English-only” policy has, of late, been classified as “neocolonialistic” (Auerbach, 1993: 13). The international dominance of English native speakers, who find absolution in the dogma of monolingualism when they cannot understand the language of their pupils, together with the cheaper mass production of strictly English-speaking textbooks in the Anglo-American mother country, constitutes one of the reasons behind the sanctification of, and the demand for, monolingualism in the classroom.¹

The alternative: The mother tongue as a base of reference
I present a theory that restores the mother tongue to its rightful place as the most important ally a foreign language can have, one which would, at the same time, redeem some 2000 years of documented foreign-language teaching, which has always held the mother tongue in high esteem. The mother- tongue is, for all school subjects, including foreign-language lessons, a child’s strongest ally and should, therefore, be used systematically. In contrast, methodological thought throughout the twentieth century has been dominated by a negative metaphor: Foreign language teachers build islands that are in constant danger of being flooded by the sea of the mother tongue. They have to fight back this sea, build dams against it, stem its tide.

This much is true: Every new language is confronted by an already-existing mother tongue. All languages are competitors in the sense that if they are not used, they may be lost, and there is only a limited amount of time that can be shared between them. Precisely because the mother tongue is always available, it is so easy to avoid using a foreign language – a constant temptation for pupils and teachers. We do not learn any language by using another one. This is a truth that has nonetheless led to false beliefs. And, in contrast to this view, I present the following theory:

Using the mother tongue, we have (1) learnt to think, (2) learnt to communicate and (3) acquired an intuitive understanding of grammar. The mother tongue opens the door, not only to its own grammar, but to all grammars, inasmuch as it awakens the potential for universal grammar that lies within all of us. This foreknowledge is the result of interactions between a first language and our fundamental linguistic endowment, and is the foundation on which we build our Selves. It is the greatest asset people bring to the task of foreign language learning. For this reason, the mother tongue is the master key to foreign languages, the tool which gives us the fastest, surest, most precise, and most complete means of accessing a foreign language.

The theory predicts that the mother tongue as a cognitive and pedagogical resource will be more important for pupils of seven or eight upwards, by which time the mother tongue has taken firm root, and it will be more in evidence in the conventional classroom, where exposure to the FL is inevitably restricted, than in immersion situations.