Benefits of the Students’ L1 in the L2 as a Foreign Language Classroom

The teaching-learning of an L2 has been historically based on a bilingual approach, mainly through the method called the grammar-translation method. This changed as new paradigms emerged, giving rise to monolingual approaches, and the integration of new methodologies that emphasized the exclusive use of the L2 (^{Richards & Rodgers, 2014}) in the classroom.

One of the general principles of monolingual approaches is to maximize the use of the L2 in the classroom. As a result, some scholars reject any potential beneficial use of the L1 and advocate for the target-language-only use in the L2 classroom (^{Brown, 2014}; ^{Harmer, 2001}; ^{Larsen-Freeman, 2000}; ^{Richards & Rodgers, 2014}). Similarly, they ignore that, in the real world, both students and teachers have different reasons for using the L1 in particular situations, especially where teaching-learning is given in the context of EFL or when the L1 is shared by the teacher and his/her students (^{Du, 2016}; ^{Khati, 2011}; ^{Nation, 2003}).

Currently, the use of the L1 in the L2 classroom already has both theoretical and empirical postulates in its favor (^{Auerbach, 1993}; ^{Bozorgian & Fallahpour, 2015}; ^{Du, 2016}; ^{Harmer, 2001}; ^{Kayaoğlu, 2012}; ^{Khati, 2011}; ^{Levine, 2014}; ^{Liao, 2006}; ^{Nation, 2003}; ^{Ostovar-Namaghi & Norouzi, 2015}; ^{Yildiz & Yeşilyurt, 2016}), which show that a reasonable use of the L1 during the teaching-learning process of the L2 can, among other things:

In sum, reasonable and judicious use of the L1 is positive and enhances the teaching and learning process. Considering this, some advocates still warn against its excessive use (^{Cook, 2001}; ^{Swain & Lapkin, 2000}).

Disadvantages of Using the L1 in the L2 Class as a Foreign Language

In contrast to the above, there are authors such as ^{Yildiz and Yeşilyurt (2016)} and ^{Bozorgian and Fallahpour, (2015)} who assert that the use of L1 proves disadvantageous. One of the most common arguments discussed in the literature is that there is a reduction of exposure to the target language in the foreign language classroom.

The foregoing is congruent and consistent with the postulates of monolingual approaches, which support the exclusive use of L2 in the foreign language classrooms. One of the principles that these approaches put forward is that the L2 can be learned in the same way as an L1, so it is vital to continuously expose learners to the L2 to achieve learning (^{Kieu, 2010}).

In this context, the results shown in ^{Mora Pablo, Lengeling, Rubio Zenil, Crawford, and Goodwin’s (2011)} study indicate that overexposure to the mother tongue in foreign language classes can generate in the students a dependency on using only the L1, truncating the possibility to practice the L2. This had been previously confirmed by ^{Harmer (2001)} in his literary review on the subject.

An important issue to take into consideration in this scenario is that the use of L1 is commonly linked to a low mastery of the L2 by the teacher (^{Kovacic & Kirinic, 2011}; ^{Ostovar-Namaghi & Norouzi, 2015}; ^{Reimer, 2012}). This may obviously hinder the students’ possibilities to have quality language input from their teachers.

Studies on the Use of L1 in the Foreign Language Classroom

At present, the literature regarding the role played by the L1 in foreign language teaching and the research examining its different uses within the foreign language classroom make it clear that the use of the students’ native language is a common practice (^{Bozorgian & Fallahpour, 2015}; ^{Kayaoğlu, 2012}; ^{Kovacic & Kirinic, 2011}; ^{López et al., 2016}; ^{Mohebbi & Alavi, 2014}; ^{Reimer, 2012}; ^{Rodríguez & Oxbrow, 2008}; ^{Schweers, 1999}; ^{Tang, 2002}; ^{Yildiz & Yeşilyurt, 2016}).

The studies mentioned above examine aspects concerning the use of the L1 in the EFL classroom regarding, for example, the frequency of L1 use (^{Kovacic & Kirinic, 2011}; ^{Schweers, 1999}, ^{Tang, 2002}), the perceptions of teacher trainees (^{Yildiz & Yeşilyurt, 2016}), the perceptions and opinions of in-service teachers (^{Bozorgian & Fallahpour, 2015}; ^{Kayaoğlu, 2012}, ^{Mohebbi & Alavi, 2014}), the perception of teachers and students (Kovacic & Kirinic, 2011; ^{López et al., 2016}; ^{Reimer, 2012}; Tang, 2002) and teachers’ attitude (^{Schweers, 1999}; ^{Tang, 2002}). The data collected from the results and conclusions of the studies carried out by the aforementioned authors support the uses of L1 in the EFL classroom. These findings also reveal how the use of the L1, addressed from different situations or purposes, influences the EFL classroom.

In regard to the teaching of lexis and grammar, the most repetitive results of the abovementioned studies show that both teachers and students believe the L1 to be useful when teaching new vocabulary, grammatical structures, and concepts difficult to explain in the L2. An important point mentioned by authors such as ^{Schweers (1999)}, ^{Rodríguez and Oxbrow (2008)}, and ^{López et al. (2016)} is that the use of the L1 seeks to ensure that students can contrast their mother tongue with the foreign language, helping them to internalize knowledge and to notice differences and similarities between both languages, contributing to the facilitation of the L2 learning process.

Similarly, it is argued that the use of L1 shows benefits by encouraging and motivating students to learn English, consequently developing a pro-active participation of students and teachers (^{Bozorgian & Fallahpour, 2015}; ^{Kovacic & Kirinic, 2011}; ^{Mohebbi & Alavi, 2014}; ^{Schweers, 1999}; ^{Tang, 2002}; ^{Yildiz & Yeşilyurt, 2016}). Also, some research findings claim that the use of the L1 helps to teach students with low motivation and/or low mastery of the English language and to improve rapport between the teacher and student. According to ^{Yildiz and Yeşilyurt (2016)}, due to the constant use of L2 in the classroom, there were cases of students who became more anxious when they could not understand what was being said in the L2 and consequently could not understand what was going on in the class, generating a negative attitude towards the learning process and the exclusive use of the target language.

Paradigm

Given the aforementioned, the research reported herein is descriptive, non-experimental, and cross-sectional (^{Hernández, Fernández, & Baptista, 2006}). It is also quantitative since the collected data can be transformed into usable unbiased statistics.

Participants and Study Context

Regarding the selection of the participants, it is of a non-probabilistic and for convenience type, as defined by ^{Hernández et al. (2006)} as “Subgroup of the population in which the choice of the elements does not depend on the probability but on the characteristics of the investigation” (p. 241, our translation). In this way, the participants of this study were 229 university students of the EFL Teacher Training Program (Pedagogía en inglés, in Spanish) at four Chilean universities located in four regions of the country: Arica-Parinacota and Antofagasta (two northern regions), and Maule and Ñuble (southern part of the country, covering around one thousand miles of the territory). Out of the 229 participants, 132 were in the first-year level of the program and 97 in the fourth year. The total number of participants included 155 female and 74 male students.

According to the geographical location of the participants, the breakdown is as follows: Arica-Parinacota, 27; Antofagasta, 86; Maule, 54; Ñuble 62. The data collection was carried out in person during the month of October of 2017. Appropriate facilities were used for this purpose and the ethical aspects involved in the research were secured.

As for the four universities included in this study, they include the same axes and dimensions for EFL teacher training. The first dimension is the communicative competence of the English language and the knowledge of linguistics, literature, and culture. The second dimension is the development of competencies related to the methodology and didactics of EFL teaching, and the last one is the attitudinal dimension, linked to the personal and professional stance (^{Abrahams & Farias, 2010}; Ministerio de Educación, 2013a). Additionally, these four universities follow the guiding standards and current plans and programs of the Ministry of Education (^{Ministerio de Educación, 2013a}) during the years of training. For that reason, the predominant methodological approach taught in the didactics and methodology courses of these four universities corresponds to communicative language teaching.

Data Collection Instrument

The data were obtained by means of ^{Mohebbi and Alavi’s (2014)} questionnaire, which uses a Likert scale with 22 statements (see Appendix A). These statements were translated into Spanish and adapted to meet the needs of the study regarding the participants who were not in-service teachers (Mohebbi and Alavi surveyed in-service teachers in their study). The 22 statements are related to situations or contexts in which Spanish could be used in the EFL classes. For each statement, the participants had to indicate the frequency of use of Spanish according to the options never, rarely, sometimes, usually, and always.

In order to verify the understanding and reliability of the statements, a piloting was carried out with the participation of second- and third-year students of the EFL teacher training program of only one of the universities included in the study. In addition, open questions were added in order to verify the internal validity of the instrument (see Appendix B).

To protect the ethical aspects of the investigation, the participants were asked to sign an informed consent form. The application of the instrument was given at the convenience of the students’ course schedule, which meant using approximately 45 minutes of class time of one of their courses.

Exploratory Factor Analysis

In order to identify the internal structure of the data, a factor analysis was done. To do this, a parallel Horn analysis was performed in order to identify the optimum number of factors to be retained. Figure 1 illustrates the results of the test.

Figure 1 Results of the Horn Statistical Processing 

Figure 1 shows that only two factors were higher than the 95th percentile of the simulated eigenvalues, so a factorial solution of 2 factors will be considered.

A factorial analysis was carried out using the Maximum Likelihood method as the extraction method and the Direct Oblimin method as rotation. Regarding the sampling adequacy indexes, a KMO = .921 was obtained and for the sphericity test an X2 = 2398.422, p = .00. Table 1 shows the exploratory factor analysis.

Items 12, 20, and 19 were excluded from the analysis since they failed to lean toward any of the two factors. The first factor explained 35.032% of the variance of the model and considered items 8, 9, 10, 11, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, and 21. By content, these items referred to the use of Spanish with pedagogical-didactic purposes. The second factor grouped items 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 22 and explained 6.25% of the variance. This factor referred to the use of Spanish to maintain the student-teacher relationship.

Descriptive Statistics and Mean Difference Tests

Below are descriptive statistics of the calculated variables that were obtained with the exploratory factor analysis. Table 2 summarizes the global descriptive statistics.

As shown in Table 2, the means are similar, in rather central values of the scale. However, the average of the use dimension for the student-teacher relationship is slightly higher.

Table 3 summarizes the descriptive statistics by university and at the same time places the contrast statistics for the group comparison. As observed, in both cases there were significant differences in at least one group with respect to the others (p < .05). Subsequently, the post-hoc tests were analyzed to identify where the differences could be found. The Tukey test was used since the assumption of equality of variances was not violated in either case.

In the first place, for the use of Spanish for pedagogical-didactic purposes, Uni.4 was significantly superior to Uni.2 and Uni.1 but not to Uni.3.

On the other hand, with the dimension of use of Spanish for the teacher-student relationship, there were only differences between Uni.4 and Uni.3 as shown in Table 4. Again, it was the first which had the highest average, which implies a greater use in this dimension.

For the participants’ course level (first or fourth), no statistically significant differences were found in the means. This can be observed in Table 5.

In this regard, both purposes are statistically the same for both course levels. Although this is not a longitudinal study, it may be possible to infer that the perceptions these participants have when they start the program will not change as they move along their training which, in turn, may mean that the teacher education they receive regarding exclusive use of the L2 in the classroom does not permeate their perceptions and beliefs.