Role of Mother Tongue in Learning English for Specific Purposes

ESP World, Issue 1 (22), Volume 8, 2009, http://www.esp-world.info

ROLE OF MOTHER TONGUE IN LEARNING ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES Galina Kavaliauskienė
Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania Abstract A revival of interest to using a mother tongue in the English classroom is stipulated by necessity to improve language accuracy, fluency and clarity. This paper aims at examining students’ perceptions of the use of mother tongue and translation in various linguistic situations. The activities that help raise learners’ awareness of the language use are described. The findings demonstrate that all learners need a support of mother tongue in English classes, but the amount of the native language needed depends on students’ proficiency in English. The statistical significance of the research results was computed by employing the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) software.

Introduction The state-of-the-art teaching of languages is based on the communicative method which emphasizes the teaching English through English. However, the idea of abandoning the native tongue is too stressful to many learners, who need a sense of security in the experience of learning a foreign language. In the past, the prevalence of grammar-translation method led to the extraordinary phenomenon: students were unable to speak fluently after having studied the language for a long time. This led to the idea that all use of the mother tongue in the language classroom should be avoided (Harmer, 2001:131). Translation has been thought as uncommunicative, boring, pointless, difficult, and irrelevant.
ROLE OF MOTHER TONGUE IN LEARNING ENGLISH FOR SPECIFIC PURPOSES Galina Kavaliauskienė

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ESP World, Issue 1 (22), Volume 8, 2009, http://www.esp-world.info

Recently there has been a revival of interest to translation due to the shift of its emphasis - to using a mother tongue as a resource for the promotion of language learning. Translation develops three qualities

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