Monday, September 15, 2008
The Role of L1 in CLT
Ch.3 provides helpful guidelines for designing communicative activities that focus on fluency and authentic practice. Most of you can see the benefits of using communicative practice to motivate learners and fulfill their learning needs. I have a question though. Remember I talked about the relation between L1 and L2 last Tuesday. Since our students are so eager to use their native language (i.e. Chinese) in the classroom, are we going to ask them to take off all L1 and use English only in any classroom communicative practice? Would that be practical? How are we going to enforce it? How about the low beginners? I guess this is a common problem for most mono-linguistic classrooms like ours. Do you have any suggestions?
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I haven't finished the chapter yet but I think it's impractical to ask our students to only use L2 in the classroom at least in low levels. L1 is very natural to them in the early levels and L2 is still very confusing and unnatural for them to hear and speak.
I do have a nice strategy to get them using more English though that might be helpful. Thanks to Leah who told me about the website, I use bablefish.com to grab a few key words of the lesson in Chinese characters. When the time comes to explain a lesson, I write up the word in Chinese that they would need to understand anyway as a key, for example, vocabulary, tool, use, or true and false, tomorrow it will be "paragraph." Then, they get excited about me putting effort into learning how to write Chinese and I ask them to tell me how to say it in Cantonese and Mandarin. That's to get them excited and get the need to use Chinese out of them (also to wake them up sometimes). I then say, "ok, I'll ask how to say this again at the end of class for my knowledge, but for you let's get back to English." I sometimes say that in English and sometimes in Chinese, just to give them another lesson.
In this way, you can try to control when they use Chinese and give them an outlet after concentrating on English a while. It's good to refocus them as well every 20 min or so and they feel that you know how hard it is for them to learn a 2nd language.
So my goal is not to take L1 out of the class but to try to minimize the use of it. As soon as someone doesn't understand something, they are likely to ask what it is in Chinese and then everyone starts using Chinese.
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