Wolfgang Butzkamm

The theory in detail

This theory can be broken down into 10 statements:

Maxim 1. The FL learner must build upon existing skills and knowledge acquired in and through the MT.

Monolingual lessons without the help of the mother tongue are extrinsically possible; however, monolingual learning is an intrinsic impossibility. No one can simply turn off what they already know. We postulate that the mother tongue is “silently” present in beginners, even when lessons are kept monolingual.

Just as we build upon our ability to vocalise, read and to write, all of which have been developed via our mother tongue, so too are we unable to switch off our knowledge of the world, again acquired through the mother tongue. “Ignoring or forbidding English will not do, for learners inevitably engage in French-English associations and formulations in their minds.” (Hammerly, 1989: 51). “Translation / transfer is a natural phenomenon and an inevitable part of second language acquisition..., regardless of whether or not the teacher offers or ‘permits’ translation.” (Harbord, 1992: 351). Ever since the days of Sweet and Palmer, the irrepressibility of associations in the MT has been regularly confirmed as a sad, but inevitable, fact of life by teachers observing in their own classrooms.

This attitude, however, has a false ring to it: “You can banish the MT from the classroom, but you cannot banish it from the pupils’ heads.” It sounds as if we were in fact saying: “Sorry, but we can’t do anything about it, so let’s accept it”. However, teachers should do everything to work with this natural tendency rather than against it – not because it is inevitable, but because it is a vital stage for the beginner: without it there would be blank incomprehension. Successful learners capitalise on the vast amount of linguistic skills and world knowledge they have accumulated via the MT. Every teacher quite naturally assumes that his or her pupils already know what words such as birthday and postman mean within a given culture before they set about explaining the words anniversaire or facteur. Consider how often a child will have celebrated birthdays, or seen a postman. Even if we deal with cultures that restrict the concept of birthday to the day of one’s birth, the MT word would still be a suitable starting point for comprehension. Rather than reconceptualise the world, we need to extend our concepts, with any necessary cultural adjustment or refinement. For the beginner, becoming aware of meanings automatically involves connecting them with the MT – until the FL has established an ever-more complex network for itself.

I have borrowed the phrase Language Acquisition Support System (LASS) from Bruner (1983) who uses it along with environmental “scaffolding” in the context of L1 acquisition. In FL learning, the LASS is provided by the MT with learners engaging in their own self-scaffolding. Our job is to assist them in this task instead of ignoring or even trying to suppress what goes on in the pupils’ minds.

Maxim 2. Ersatz-techniques for meaning-conveyance function less well than the MT and can even be harmful.

Textbook illustrations and blackboard work, along with the careful selection and grading of words and structures are compensatory aids that facilitate a monolingual approach but can often lead to misunderstanding in unpredictable ways. Unfortunately, they may prevent pupils from making the right kind of associations with MT equivalents (e.g., “I see! Anniversaire means birthday.”). For many phrases, only a clarification in the mother tongue can bring pupils to trust in a foreign-language expression („Können wir nicht mal was anderes machen?“ “Can’t we do something else?”). Support aids, as well as the resourcefulness of proficient teachers, simply cover up the fact that the fundamental assumption, the monolingualism of teaching, needs to be revised.

Studies in which informal meaning checks were used at the end of a lesson have repeatedly shown that pupils misunderstand more than their teachers realise. The latter had assumed that the new expressions had been explained so carefully, precisely and clearly that nothing could go wrong.

"Look at the sky, it's going to rain" was a textbook sentence accompanied by a picture. Half the class understood "sky" as the foreign-language word for the dark cloud in the picture. This is how a misconception nests itself in the mind, especially as "cloud" would also fit perfectly, if not better, in the original sentence. But as soon as the pupils want to make up their own sentences and use "sky" when they mean "cloud", all is lost. Precision of meaning is important; rough comprehension is simply not good enough.

The following quote from a student’s retrospective self-report illustrates the confusion and frustration caused by incomprehension: “In the end, I got it wrong to the point where Mrs. H. wanted me to give the meaning of the sentence: "Can you see the man?" I interpreted the sentence as: "Kennst Du diesen Mann?"Do you know this man? My classmates laughed in a subdued manner. Obviously, they knew better. I was deeply embarrassed and I hated the teacher for that. After all, the sentence "Can you see the man?" sounded to me perfectly like the English version of "Kennst Du diesen Mann?" I took the sound of "see the" for "diesen" and "can" for "kennst".(Jochen M.)

Whereas visual aids of all sorts can enrich teaching, the rigorous selection and grading of texts can be counterproductive. The “content vacuum” and the “topic-neutrality ” which have been found to characterize beginners’ classes (Mitchell et al., 1988), are largely due to the fact that textbook authors are forced to order their pedagogic material and minimize both lexical and grammatical randomness in order to make monolingualism possible. (Remember the typical Berlitz diet, still fed to Berlitz clients today: “This is a book. It is big. It is on the table…”). There are more exciting things to say than what colour one’s uniform is. Without such restrictions, we would have different, richer texts.

Maxim 3. MT aids make it easier to conduct whole lessons in the foreign language. Pupils gain confidence and, paradoxically, become less dependent on their MT.

This point addresses a central misunderstanding which probably explains why a century-old error is only now being corrected. “Give the devil an inch and he’ll take a mile”, seems to be the accepted wisdom. But when used properly, the MT steals very little time away from the FL, and, in fact, helps to establish it as the general means of communication in the classroom. The lesson and the organisation of the lesson, still take place in the foreign language. This fulfils a necessary and correct requirement of the direct method. Paradoxically, a ‘foreign language friendly’ atmosphere is best achieved through the specific, albeit discrete use of the mother tongue. This is how we proceed:

Teacher: “You’ve skipped a line. Du hast eine Zeile übersprungen. You’ve skipped a line.”

Teacher: “I mean the last word but one.” Das vorletzte Wort. The last word but one.”

The teacher, on the spot, inserts a translation between repetitions of an unknown phrase, almost as an aside, spoken in a different voice or with a slight break in the flow of speech to mark it as an “intruder” (“sandwich-technique”). The teacher could even write the expression up on the blackboard, in an area specifically set aside for this purpose, getting pupils to copy it down into a separate exercise book, perhaps, at the end of the lesson, so as not to interrupt the ongoing business. This three-step procedure can solve many problems, but needs a counterpart when pupils initiate utterances and insert a MT phrase. These should not be forbidden but must be seized upon by the teacher:

Pupil: “Ich wollt’ das auch sagen.”

Teacher: “Oh, I see. In English it is: “I was going to say the same”. Try it, please.”
MT expressions that come from the pupils spontaneously also need to be written up and collected. Only then can the teacher insist on the use of the FL phrases, and indeed must now do so - henceforth the same expressions in the MT are proscribed. If we keep some self-discipline, so will our pupils, and we need not fear a break in the dam. The timely, well-directed use of the MT will not end the day-to-day, tough battle that teachers endure in trying to establish an FL atmosphere among their pupils. It will, however, temper it considerably.

Dodson (1967 / 1972) invented the sandwich-procedure for teaching dialogues. The teacher conveys the meaning of the lines by giving utterance equivalents. Here’s a line from a dialogue I taught to German pupils: "Would you have marked it wrong?” “Hätten Sie's denn angestrichen?" „Would you have marked it wrong?” Through the “sandwiching” of the translation between the repeated lines of the text, the students are led to repeat the line directly after the FL stimulus. Thus, there is no interference from the translation, which must be as idiomatic and suited to the context as possible, so that every pupil catches on straight away. They know the exact impact of the utterance because of the accompanying intonation, voice quality, facial expressions and gestures, including the effect of typical German modal particles such as "denn", "doch", or "eigentlich", the salt and pepper of German speech. This type of meaning-conveyance is a very long way away from both monolingual definitions or paraphrases and bilingual word-lists, because it includes the pragmatic aspects of meaning and can render emotional overtones. Pupils will be less coy about speaking the FL. They understand so clearly that they trust themselves to use the expression directly and to vary it according to their own needs. And that is precisely the key factor for success in learning: what the learners do with what they have correctly comprehended. The more time and effort that is invested at this stage, the less chance the MT has to cause interference or obstruct the learning process. On the contrary, the native language launches, as it were, the pupils' canoes out into the foreign-language current, which then grabs hold of them and carries them safely downstream.

We are reminded of Harold Palmer’s distinction between a quick, initial grasp of meaning and the subsequent acquisition of fluency in using the new language items, the latter requiring considerable time and effort. ‘This important distinction was forgotten when the pendulum swung in the 1960s to audio-visual methods...Insecure teachers, anxious to be in the fashion, were to be seen going through every kind of contortion...trying to get precise meanings across to their class without letting slip a word of English.’ (Hawkins, 1981: 133).²