Olga Essay

Use of native language in teaching of foreign idioms

The strategies in teaching English may vary according to the place, teacher, student, level of English or the needs of the moment; however, I pretend to make a reflection on the use of the mother tongue in English language teaching, because if we talk about translation we are involving our mother tongue in this learning process.

Although it is correct to think that first we must know our language and then think about speaking another, it is also correct to say that the translation in English language learning can be very confusing because english is not always translated literally and it can give a totally different meaning to the phrase, and many people who wants to know the meanings of the words forget the really important thing that would be to habituate our ear to the language that we want to learn although at the beginning we are not understanding a lot It is necessary to know the sounds and then to reproduce them to finally have a more fluently English, In this way the student is encouraged to listen attentively and relate what is said with the gestures or what is done, so, when the person hear the Word or the phrase again he will know what it is about and will understand the context of the sentence without having to translate word by Word.

On the other hand, Widdowson1 seems to agree with the use of the mother tongue in language teaching. This author proposes the scheme discourse-to-discourse which proposes the following: 

 "... language learners should be aware of what they are doing when performing linguistic tasks, they should be guided to recognize that these tasks relate to the way in which they use their own language for the achievement of genuine communication. 

This principle naturally leads to the association of the language that is learned with what already known and the use of the language for the exploration and extension of their knowledge". 

Starting from this point we can notice that in many places and for many people this method is good, however there are different ways to teach a second language.

I faithfully consider that a second language is learned by fully facing the second language and it is not necessary to translate to understand it.