The role of mother tongue in english language teaching

Participation is even. 
•
Motivation is high. 
•
Language is of an acceptable level. 
(1996:120). 
To reach all of these characteristics, teachers should: 
•
Use group work. 
•
Base the activity on easy language. 
•
Make a careful choice of topic and task to stimulate interest.
•
Give some instruction or training in discussion skills. 
•
Keep students speaking the target language.
(Ur, 1996:121-122). 
Moreover, Willis suggests examples of language teachers might use to leave the 
mother tongue out: 
•
Role play: Let´s go back to the dialogue we practised about… 
•
Setting the scene with a picture or a social situation: We´re going to do some role 
play now. Imagine… 
•
Promoting discussion: What could have happen earlier?; Come on, you could say… 
•
Explanation and description: In pair I want you to give someone else direction from 
your school to… 
•
Guessing games: Someone has to think of a famous person, someone we all know. 
•
Problem solving: When you have found out write down the differences, and call me. 
(1991:129-131). 
However, when teachers try their best, but pupils keep using the native language:
Probably the best way to keep pupils speaking the target language is simply to be 
there yourself as much as possible, reminding them and modelling the language use 
yourself: there is no substitute for nagging! 
(Ur, 1996:122). 

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36 
4.1.4. The nature of writing 
Writing as the last but not least of the four skills has according to Harmer, “always 
formed part of the syllabus in the teaching of English.” (2004:31). It has got of course many 
possiblities how to use it, ranging from writing for grammar purpose to the mastering 
ability to effective writing (Harmer, 2004:31), but because of the topic of my thesis it will 
be described very briefly.
There are some reasons why write in class provided by Willis: 
•
To learn the motor skills of handwriting; to develop neatness, clarity and respect. 
•
To learn spelling and punctuation. 
•
To reinforce vocabulary and structures already mastered orally. 
•
To keep a written record of what has been learnt and achieved. 
•
To practise for end-of term achievment tests. 
(1991:156).
The fact is that before pupils write, teachers should make sure that they: 
•
Can say it. 
•
Can read it. 
•
Can understand it. 
•
Know what you want them to do. 
•
Know how you want them to do it. 
•
Know why they are doing it. 
(Willis, 1991:156). 
All of these tasks stated above teachers have to perform when teaching writing to pupils, 
which is again interrelated to teaching listening, speaking and reading. Teachers have to 
provide examples and perform the tasks before, during, and after pupil´s writing. Among 
others, these tasks include demonstating, motivating and provoking, supporting, responding 
and evaluating (Harmer, 2004:41-42).
As for the other skills, Willis provides a list of classroom language, refering to suitable 
writing exercises. For example: 
•
Preparing to write: Before you begin to write let´s see if you can tell me what you´re 
going to write. 
•
Giving instruction: So, you match these sentences, then write them carefully. 
•
Details: Don´t forget to write neatly. 
•
Helping students to spot their mistakes: Check your spelling of… 
•
Setting simple homework: For homework not now, could you finish writing this? 

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37 
•
Student queries: Excuse me, Miss…I didn´t hear. 
(1991:159-160). 
All of these skills are important and all of them are closely linked. The fact is, that 
teachers have to realize the effectiveness of the target language exposure to understand its 
meaning, understand its form and of course, practise it. As it is the meaning, form and 
practice that are hidden in each of the skills of listening, reading, speaking and writing. 
4.2. Teaching English in the classroom 
This part is based on Halliwell´s perception of teaching English to pupils. Halliwell
suggests that foreign language speakers have been taking risk in using the foreign language 
while operating on partial information. It is not important that we do not understand 
everything what has been said to us, but that we are able to guess the bids as if we do 
understand everything. However, in the foreign language classroom teachers tend to check 
every word of English, they also say one sentence in English and then translate it into the 
mother tongue. Although this happens from the teacher´s best motives, the constant 
checking implyes that teachers expect the pupils to understand every word. The fact is that
pupils are unlikely to be able to understand everything. Even in our mother tongue we do 
not understand everything, since we deal with the whole message. The real communication 
demands risk taking, without risks and mistakes we would not learn anything and thus 
teachers can teach foreign language through the medium of the target language itself. All of 
the four skills of listening, speaking, reading and writing must be involved in the foreign 
language classroom, but the biggest contribution is in the spoken interaction among pupils. 
Halliwell further proposes that teachers can leave pupils talking in pairs or groups doing so 
called information gap activities without fear that pupils will totally slip into their mother 
tongue. This example of the second form of real language use in the classroom contribute to 
the learning process by: 
•
Encouraging pupils to predict meaning. 
•
Providing element of indirect meaning. 
•
Confirming that language is used for real situations. 
•
Increasing the amount of exposure pupils get to the language. 

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This is because classroom talk is very limited so teachers can conduct the whole lesson 
almost entirely in English on a basis of a small number of phrases and structures (2000:12-
16). The language used by the teacher should be very simple, since pupils respond very 
well to context and facial expression. There are several ways to help pupils understand such 
as: 
•
Using gesture while giving instructions and explaining. 
•
Demonstrating, miming, acting. 
•
Speaking simply, but with natural stress and intonation. 
•
Repeating and paraphrasing, giving pupils time to think it out for themselves 
sometimes.
•
Giving lots of examples and using visual aids where possible. 
•
Establishing routines in class for various activities.
(Willis, 1991:84). 
In this chapter I focused on the mother tongue in English language classroom. I tried 
to show that judicious use of mother tongue can be occasionally beneficial for pupils, but I 
am definitely not saying that teachers should abusing it by overusing. In addition, most of 
the suggestions follow current communicative approach and thus replace the use of mother 
tongue with other techniques if possible. Description of each four skills also provides a 
sample classroom language which teachers might use instead of native language. Since if 
teachers use the same language all the time, they will develop language routines that 
contribute to pupils´ understanding. As I said, there are some cases when mother tongue 
might be occasionally used, but teachers must keep in mind that exposure and practice of 
the target language is the main thing if they want to reach their teaching goals. Concerning 
pupils, they should use their mother tongue only when it is permitted by the teacher and it 
is again the teacher, who has to stop pupils using it and ask to return to the target language. 
Teachers should lead pupils on to perceiving target language as the means of 
communication and to using it for real-life situations. To recap, when pupils are 
accustomed to use the target language, they do not tend to need understand each word and 
they are able to successfully convey and perceive message, which is the goal of current 
foreign language teaching. 

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39 
5. Research 
The aim of this part is to undertake research in the classroom environment and to 
provide its findings. The research will be described successively, firstly it will be 
introduced and then focused on its phases concerning methods, tools, data collection and 
other related issues. 
5.1. Introduction 
The question whether to use the pupils´ mother tongue has been one of the biggest 
dillemas throughout the history of foreign language teaching. The current monolingual 
approach suggests that the target language should be used as the base for communication to 
maximize the effectiveness of learning the target language. Therefore, my research aims to 
investigate the teacher´s use of mother tongue in English language classroom. It is closely 
connected with the theoretical part, since the research should find out whether the teacher 
trainees of English are able to conduct their lessons mostly in English according to the 
current communicative movement described in the second chapter. To achieve this goal, it 
will be observed in what situations, phases of the lesson and how effectively the teacher 
trainees use their mother tongue instead of the target language. For this purpose, a set of 
thirty video recordings of the teacher trainees was chosen. The video recordings were taken 
during the Clinical year project, which will be now briefly described. The description 
provided here is adopted from 
Č
erná´s ICT in Teacher Education: Extending Opportunities