The Use Of The Mother Tongue In Foreign Language Classrooms: A Study Of A Chinese Middle School

The role of the first language in second language classrooms is always a controversial issue in applied linguistics. The debate on whether it is helpful or impeding to second language learning, which is quite Fierce among the applied linguists and language teachers, has reached no agreements. Even among those who advocate an appropriate use of the first language in second language classrooms, how to use it appropriately remains an objective of research. To enrich the relevant literature, this study aims to explore the teacher's use of the mother tongue (Chinese) in English classrooms of a Chinese senior middle school, so as to find whether Chinese is being used by the teachers in English classrooms, what are the attitudes of students and teachers towards teachers' Chinese use, what are the reasons and purposes for teachers' using or avoiding using Chinese, and to what extent Chinese is used.The data of the study comes from questionnaires, classroom observation, and interviews, with classroom observation serving as the main source of data. The findings fall into several aspects. First, Chinese is still used by the teachers in English classrooms, though influenced by many interactive factors. Second, most students and teachers approved of the judicious use of Chinese, which, according to them, could help the students learn English well. Third, the extent of teachers' use of Chinese was expected to be less than 30%, but the use in natural teaching process varied according to the context. Finally, teachers mainly used Chinese to explain grammar points and to translate.Based on analysis of the data, this study concludes that in second language classrooms, the mother tongue plays a complementary and facilitative role which cannot be totally prohibited, that the extents to which the mother tongue is used and the purposes for which it is used in different contexts vary greatly, and that the teachers should take the need of students, the teaching environment, and the capability of the teachers themselves into account when they are choosing the language to use. Some pedagogical implications of the study are finally provided in addition to the discussion of its limitations and recommendations for further studies.