This post is like a game of Fortunately / Unfortunately.
Fortunately, it is easy to go over the existing studies because there only two of them. That I know of.
Unfortunately, this means that we know very very little and we have no academic basis for any of our classroom practices. We can only hypothesize.
Fortunately, this means that we know very little and we have no academic basis for any of our classroom practices. We CAN hypothesize.
Unfortunately, that means that no one is right.
Fortunately, that means that, really, no one is wrong, either. Yay to that!
Unfortunately, that means no clear guidance and a high probability of making mistakes.
Fortunately, that also means that we can do what we want, essentially, taking into account only our students’ benefit and, of course, our school’s policy.
Unfortunately, that also means no clear and structured support for the novice teachers who might not be able yet ready to make such decisions themselves.
Fortunately, …
OK, I know, this game could go on forever. Let’s look at what is available instead.
The first study was carried out in from South Korea, by Song and Ho Lee in 2019. It compares the effectiveness of two approaches to instruction: English only and code-switching (when the teacher systematically uses English and the children’s L1). The researchers carried out a small experiment, in which they taught a series of lessons in these two modes and measured the kids’ performance as well as asked for the kids’ feedback.
According the findings, the children who had an opportunity to participate in lessons with bilingual instruction (specifically in the area of new language clarification) achieved better immediate and longer-term results as regards the knowledge of the new vocabulary. It seems that introducing the language using both Korean and English has helped the kids remember all the new words better than in the groups where only English was used.
What is interesting, the researchers also asked the kids how they liked to learn and the majority of them admitted that they enjoyed learning in two language. It would be interesting to see whether that meant any major changes in the way that the groups were taught later on, after the completion of the 8-week period of the original experiment and whether the teachers observed any positive or negative long-term changes.
The other published study comes from my motherland and it was published by Scheffler and Dominska in 2018. This research was carried out in private and state kindergartens with the EFL lessons and it dealt with the teachers’ beliefs as well as the students’ use of the L1.
The teachers reported resorting to the kids’ L1 in the situations the children’s well-being was at stake and while dealing with some classroom management issues, especially after a failure to use English to a satisfactory outcome. They also mentioned that the L1 is used to clarify the meaning of some more complex concepts or instructions, when all the other techniques are insufficient or when they risk a potential misinterpretation (p. 378). L1 was also used when the similarities between language might contribute to understanding, for example with all the cognates such as ‘helicopter’ which is the same or almost the same word in Polish and English.
As regards the students and their own use of the L1, despite the fact that different instutions followed different policies (as in: no strict policy in the state kindergartens and an English only in the private schools), kids in both contexts reacted in precisely the same way to support their own learning of the foreign language. Authors reported cases of kids using Polish to signal problems with understanding, responding in L1 to flashcards, translating words or instructions or commenting and developing ideas in L1 since they did not have the sufficient amount of L2.
It is interesting to see that even within the same country and the same city, the approaches to the presences of the L1 can be so different. Again, the question arises of whether this has an impact on the progress that the students are making and how much Polish is actually used in the classroom on daily basis.
The use of the L1 is one of the communication strategies and it is fascinating to see that students, even so young, were using it very effectively, based on the evidence gathered in this study. It was not ‘just translation’, there was a reason and rationale behind it. But that’s a topic for another article.
To finish, a quote from one of the respondents who, when asked about the students using their L1 in class, said: ‘They sometimes use Polish, of course they do. They are Polish children’ (2018, p. 381).
Bibliography
Scheffler, P. and A. Domińska (2018), Own-language use in teaching English to preschool children, ELT Journal, 72 / 4, p. 374 – 383
Song, D. and J. Ho Lee (2019), The use of code switching for very young EFL learners, ELT Journal, 73 / 2, p. 144- 153
PS Did I get you interested? Don’t forget to check out the other articles in the series: the introduction, the gurus, my own experience and the findings from my MA dissertation research.
PPS This is one of these posts that I am hoping to be adding to so if you know of any other published research, in English, Russian, Polish or Portuguese, please, please, pretty please: Let me know!
Happy teaching!
1 thought on “L1 in the classroom: Bits of research”