Page 262 - Beyond Methods

250 Ensuring social relevance
The Role of the First Language
First language is perhaps the most useful and the least-used re- source students bring to the L2 classroom. This is partly due to two interrelated factors: the theory and practice of established methods (see Chapter 2 for details) discourage the use of L1 in the L2 class- room, and the political economy of English Language Teaching pro- motes the interests of native speakers of English who do not nor- mally share the language of their learners. There are, however, sound arguments that support the use of L1 in the L2 classroom. I shall discuss these with reference to two different learning and teaching settings: (a) minority learners in Britain and (b) L2 learners in Sri Lanka.
Minority Learners in Britain
Since the mid-1980s British schools, particularly in multilingual urban areas, have been offering home language support for learn- ers from minority ethnic communities. It has come to be known as bilingual support. The aim is to help learners access the curriculum until they develop sufficient English to move on to monolingual ed- ucation through the medium of English. It is believed that such a practice would offer psychological and social support for minority children and provide a much-needed continuity between the home and school environment.
Marilyn Martin-Jones and Mukul Saxena (1996) have studied the effect of home language use in primary classrooms in England, where a majority of learners are speakers of Panjabi and Urdu. In these classes, typically, a bilingual assistant will provide a simple explanation in the learner’s mother tongue. Here’s a sample class- room interactional episode taken from their study, reproduced here as episode 12.1. I have retained the transcription convention given in the original text.
Transcription convention:
Italics = Normal = Bold = CT = BA =
translation of Urdu/Panjabi into English transcription for English utterances transcription for U/P utterances
Class Teacher
Bilingual Assistant