Coming back in from the Cold: reassessing translation and own

language use.

Guy Cook

• in = if; shâ' = wish; llâh = God.

• If wishes God

• By the will of God

• God Willing

• Perhaps

in-shâa al modarris (إن شاء المدرس)—‘if the teacher wants’

Mirror Translation

S’il vous plaît

• If it you pleases.

• If it pleases you.

• If you please

• Please

• si le vin vous plaît (‘If you like the wine’), etc.

“I will say that I have taken a strong stand against any use of the L1 in an L2 classroom, and all my TESL students know that if they ever utter a word of Bahasa Malaysia in the classroom I will burst into their classroom and strangle them in front of their students.”(Interview data, Marcia Fisk-Ong 2003)

Questionnaire survey of teachers’ perceptions of own-language use, from a global sample of ELT practitioners. 2,785 teachers from 111 countries

Semi-structured interviews with teachers who had completed the surveys. 17 interviewees across a range of sectors and countries

Graham Hall and Guy Cook (2012) ‘Own-language use in ELT: exploring global practices and attitudes’ British Council ELT Research Papers. London, British Council.

How did we get ….

• from….• one kind of extremism…..• to another?

and how do we get back….• to a more reasonable balance?

Grammar Translation

• dry

• dull

• all writing, no speaking

• all accuracy, no fluency

• all form, no communication

• Historical

Criteria for teaching and learning

English Language Teaching

Cross lingual Teaching(translation, L1 explanations) Intralingual Teaching

(aka The Direct Method)

1882

The academic

The businessman

Henry Sweet1845-1912

Expediency, commerce and politics

• immigration/ travel/ business

• multilingual classes

• monolingual teachers

• single print runs

• national interests

• Historical

• ‘Scientific’

Criteria for teaching and learning

English Language Teaching

Cross lingual Teaching(translation, L1 explanations) Intralingual Teaching

(aka The Direct Method)

Form Focus(L2 explanationsynthetic syllabus) Meaning focus

(analytic syllabusesnatural approach,,CLTtask based teaching)

1900

1970

“How well do these analyses succeed in

generating precise predictions for patterns in language learning? Can we

use these predictions to improve language learning?”

(MacWhinney 2006: 734)

‘Scientific’ evidence – second language acquisition theory

“SLA researchers seem to have neglected the fact that the goal of SLA is bilingualism”

Sridhar and Sridhar (1986:5)

Problem One: What is ‘success’?

Authentic contemporary code switching

• mixed language partnerships

• migrant families

• schools

• workforces

• international businesses

• multilingual notices and announcements

• internet multiple language use

• films, news

“To our knowledge, no research has examined the value of contrastive FFI [Form Focused Instruction] of vocabulary, such as interlingual comparisons with learner’s L1, or translation.” Laufer and Girsai (2008)

“Unfortunately, empirical work on the effect of translation exercises on L2 learners morphosyntax is scant.” Källkvist (2008)

Problem Two: no research!!

“You are right - translation is given little attention by SLA researchers. The only exception is that translation is sometimes used as an elicitation tool to obtain L2 data. As such it is viewed sceptically because it is likely to encourage L1 transfer and thus to overstate the role this plays in L2 acquisition..”Rod Ellis (personal communication)

• Historical

• ‘Scientific’

• Pedagogic

Criteria for teaching and learning

“Psychology and linguistics have caused a good deal of harm by pretending to have answers to those questions and telling teachers (...) how they should behave. Often the ideas presented by the scientists are totally crazy and they may cause trouble. (...) The truth of the matter is that about 99 percent of teaching is making the students feel interested in the material”.

(Chomsky 1988:180-182) www.nndb.com

“I haven't heard of any data-based L2 motivation studies that used L1 use in the classroom as a motivational variable.”

(Zoltan Dornyei, personal communication)

English Language Teaching

Cross lingual Teaching(translation, L1 explanations) Intralingual Teaching

(aka The Direct Method)

Form Focus(L2 explanationsynthetic syllabus) Meaning focus

(analytic syllabusesnatural approach,,CLTtask based teaching)

1900

1970

2013 Own language movement

Own language movement

Graham Hall and Guy Cook. 2012. Own-language use in language teaching and learning: the state of the art. Language Teaching. 45/3: 271-308

“while in the classroom the teachers try to keep the two languages separate, the learners in their own minds keep the two in contact.”

(Widdowson 2003:150)

NATURAL, INEVITABLE

“….putting students at ease, conveying teacher's empathy and, in general, creating a less threatening atmosphere.” (Canagarajah 1999 : 132).

REDUCING STRESS

“At this point I was truly concerned about his feelings and unconsciously switched to English, the language that, quite frankly, was the most ‘real’ for all of us (.....) The point is that my concern about my students as individuals, as human beings, at times transcends my concern for with L2 acquisition process.”

Edstrom (2006)

PROMOTING TEACHER STUDENT UNDERSTANDING

“The research evolved from the personal experience of my return to the foreign language classroom as an adult. (….) This began the very first day of class when the teacher spoke only Spanish. I felt I had walked into the second act of a three act play, or that I had gotten into the wrong classroom. I had enrolled in a beginning class because I wanted to learn the language, so of course I could not understand anything the teacher was saying, and wondering why she acted as if I should was worrisome, making an already stressful situation even more so. (....)

(Brooks-Lewis 2009)

COMMUNICATIVE

• confidence and organization

• explicit knowledge

• avoidance avoidance

• not falling for faux amis

• acknowledging student expertise

• linking new to existing knowledge

PROMOTING LEARNING

• Interference/ transfer

• Lack of automaticity

• Word-for-wordism

Claimed disadvantages

• Historical

• ‘Scientific’

• Pedagogic

• Educational

Criteria for teaching and learning

“The reason for the large numbers of students taking English was given frankly by a somewhat disaffected instructor: many of the students proposed to end up working for airlines, or banks, in which English was worldwide lingua franca... You learned English to use computers, respond to orders, transmit telexes, decipher manifests, and so forth”.

(Edward Said 1993:369)

www.nndb.com

A different world of…

• multiple language use

• mobile migrant multilingual populations

• written internet communication

• English as a lingua franca

English speakers

• 4-500 million native speakers

• 600 million second language speakers

• 500 million foreign language speakers

• PLUS

• those learning

• those with some knowledge

Crystal 2012/ Schneider 2011

“the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech”

“confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech”

ledio.veseli.org

www.thosebastards.com

www.vec.ca

“We’ve been brought to this school by Mr Rosenberg, who, two days after our arrival, tells us he’ll take us to classes that are provided by the government to teach English to newcomers. This morning, in the rinky-dink wooden barracks where the classes are held, we’ve acquired new names. All it takes is a brief conference between Mr Rosenberg and the teacher, a kindly looking woman who tries to give us reassuring glances, but who has seen too many people come and go to get sentimental about a name. Mine - ‘Ewa’ - is easy to change into its near equivalent in English, ‘Eva’. My sister’s name - ‘Alina’ - poses more of a problem, but after a moment’s thought, Mr. Rosenberg and the teacher decide that ‘Elaine’ is close enough. My sister and I hang our heads wordlessly under this careless baptism. The teacher then introduces us to the class, mispronouncing our last name - ‘Wydra’ - in a way we’ve never heard before. We make our way to a bench at the back of the room; nothing much has happened, expect a small, seismic mental shift. (….) Our Polish names didn’t refer to us; they were as surely us as our eyes or hands. These new appellations, which we ourselves can’t pronounce, are not us. (….) We all walk to our seats, into a roomful of unknown faces, with names which make us strange to ourselves”.

(Eva Hoffman 1998)

SAFEGUARDING IDENTITY

“One nation, one people, one language”

“One classroom, one learner, one language”

Direct Method

• dissociates new from existing knowledge

• develops only monolingual skills

• hinders confidence and explicit knowledge

• denies the inevitable

• hinders teacher student rapport

• fails to redress language imbalance

Own language use

• has no sound scientific evidence against it

• makes pedagogic sense

• is relevant and useful

• maintains diversity and identity

• builds upon student knowledge

• promotes awareness

• acknowledges that languages have an untranslatable spirit

not

• overuse, or even major use

• unplanned incidental occurrence

• resorting to own-language use when tired

• or short of time.

An alternative to extremism

• ‘judicious’ or ‘optimal’ own-language use Macaro (1997)

• ‘appropriate’ combination Stern (1992).

• a structured and principled deployment of the own language, Butzkamm & Caldwell (2009: 150)

•  

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