The role of mother tongue in english language teaching

for Professional Learning. “The Clinical year project is a unique approach to teaching 
practice as a component of teacher education programmes in the Czech Republic in terms 
of its philosophy, allocated time, content and actions.” (
Č
erná and Píšová cited in 
Č
erná, 
2005, 82). The Clinical year is based on the partnership between the University of 
Pardubice and a number of primary schools in the Czech Republic. The project provides a 
real-life experience from the school environment, which is supposed to be crucial for 
teacher trainees and their professional development. After the third year of study, teacher 
trainees are deputed to the primary schools for a whole school year teaching practice and 
their position is that of an assistant. Teacher trainees should cooperate with their mentors 
and university tutors. Cooperation with mentors involves a number of activities related to 

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several teaching issues such as observation, team teaching and the assistant´s own teaching, 
whereas tutor-assistant cooperation is mainly based on communication and six projects that 
the teacher trainees have to complete within the school year. These projects are focused on 
a written diary, questionnaire and survey, observation, lesson report, audio and video 
recording and action research (2005, 82-86). The reflective technique of audio and video 
recording of the teacher trainees is the one I will use in my research. During my research 
project, I will examine these recordings to provide their findings.
5.2. Research aims and objectives 
This research aims to reveal whether the teacher trainees are able to conduct their 
lessons in English, using the target language as much as possible and thus discover the role 
of mother tongue in English language classroom. The following questions are directed in 
order to achieve my aim: 
1)
Do trainee teachers use mother tongue in English language classrooms? 
2)
If so, in what situations do they use the mother tongue instead of English and how 
frequently is the mother tongue used for this purpose? 
3)
Is the teacher trainees´ use of mother tongue effective? 
4)
What is the amount of mother tongue in English language classroom? 
Concerning these questions, to support my hypothesis, the teacher trainees should be able 
to conduct their lessons mostly in English to follow the monolingual approach. Krashen, 
who was a strong advocate of this approach, pleaded that learning foreign languages has the 
same characteristics as acquiring a mother tongue, therefore the use of mother tongue in 
foreign language classroom should be none or minimal (1981). However, Medgyes takes 
this view for “untenable on any grounds, be they psychological, linguistic and pedagogic” 
(1994, 66). Nowadays, there are some situations when it is possible for teachers to slip into 
their mother tongue, but the teachers need to very careful to avoid its abundant use. All 
these situations are provided in chapter 4 and the observation sheet is based on them.

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5.3. Research method and tools for data gathering 
The thirty teacher trainees and the audio and video recordings of their Clinical year 
teaching is the subject group of this quantitative research project. As a tool for data 
collection I chose an observation technique, since “observation plays a crucial role not only 
in classroom research, but also more generally in supporting the professional growth of 
teachers and in the process of school development.” (Hopkins, 2002:69). This technique is 
focused on phenomena directly accessible to senses with no planned intervention, however 
in the case of observing from audio and video recordings applyed to indirect observation. 
Hence a focus for my observation has been already specified, I will use focused and 
structured observation sheet (see Appendix 1) that I have created and that is based on a list 
of prepared categories, situations and phases of the lesson when mother tongue might be 
used. The offered possibilities are based partially on Schweers´s (1999) and Tang´s (2002) 
number of possible applications of the mother tongue use and on other theoretical findings 
described in chapter 4. It should be mentioned that these two researchers, Schweer and 
Tang, carried out related investigations connected to native language use. The content and 
structure of my observation sheet is detemined by the ratio of the mother tongue and the 
target language used by the teacher in the lesson. According to Denscombe, there are 
several advantages of systematic observation: 
•
Direct data collection. 
•
Systematic and rigorous .  
•
Efficient. 
•
Pre-coded data. 
•
Reliability.  
(2003). 
Within the structured observation sheet, the data will be collected by using so called a tally 
system, which is a situation when “an observer puts down a tally or tick every time a