Shall We Forget About L1 When Teaching English?

The use of students’ mother tongue in foreign language classrooms has been an issue for many years; yet, without concrete agreement among teachers and scholars who are involved. Particularly, with the rise in communicative language teaching approaches, the tendency has moved towards monolingual teaching, by minimizing or banning the L1 completely. However, most of the time, the teaching and learning context, student profile and the tasks that the students are engaged in have been ignored, and decisions about monolingual and bilingual language teaching have been made. This paper briefly outlines six current studies investigating college students’ use of L1 by making reference to the context and the task in which they are involved. After determining the functions of L1 use by students, the paper makes some suggestions about alternative ways to maximize target language use, especially in areas concerning within group communication, lack of language proficiency and classroom management procedures.