Teachers’ Beliefs and Purposes of L1 Use and Its Effects on Students’ Oral English Improvement in Selected Primary Schools

Abstract

The concern of this descriptive survey research was to exploratory Teachers’ Beliefs and purposes of L1 use and Its Effects on Students’ Oral English Improvement in Selected Primary Schools. To collect the data, classroom observation and interview were used. The classroom observation data were collected through checklist and the results were counted and recorded as Afan Oromo (L1) and English utterances of teachers and then changed into frequency and percentages. Similarly, the interview was presented to eight teachers and the data were recorded, transcribed, and then thematically analyzed. The findings revealed that the participant EFL teachers have favorable beliefs about use of L1 in EFL classes. However, they used more L1utterances than English utterances. For example, they made 1152 utterances among which 564/1152=49% were L1 and 588/1152=51% were English utterances. That means participant teachers used almost the same amount of L1 and English which implies that teachers over used L1 which has a negative effect on students’ oral English improvement.  Therefore, teachers are recommended to be good models for their students by practicing more TL than L1 to improve their students’ oral English.