86. The bilingual reform. A paradigm shift in foreign language teaching.

Abstract

This work has been written expressly to debunk an unjustifi ed myth that has permeated foreign and second language teaching in regular classrooms for decades to the evidenced detriment of the learning in such classrooms. It is a myth, founded on no sustainable theoretical basis, that has been promulgated both offi cially and through an ingrained tradition: the mother tongue of the L2 learner is asserted or understood to be a serious impediment to learning the new language. The consequent corollary is that it should be excluded systematically from the L2 classroom. The book addresses this gross error, focussing on the regular foreign language classroom with its necessarily limited time, usually in a range from four to six hours per week in toto. The situation is certainly not so dire in full immersion contexts, particularly where a young immigrant child is learning the new language and through the new language and living in the target language environment, though the approach suggested for the effective use of the mother tongue still has much to offer such contexts where actual lessons are involved. The book expounds a tightly justifi ed praxis for mother tongue use in the classroom, drawing on both the relevant theories which demonstrably support its use and practical classroom strategies that have been evolved by practitioners and researchers. The emphasis is on effective and effi cient use of the mother tongue in carefully defi ned circumstances. The authors insist that the L2 must prevail as the predominant medium and working language of the classroom, since it would be nonsense to suggest that one learns a language by mainly speaking another. However, ignoring (1) the conceptual knowledge imbedded in the mother tongue, (2) the communicative skills developed via the mother tongue, and (3) the understandings about how language works that the learner has been developing since birth is equally nonsense. In a deep sense, we only learn language once, since our fi rst language – and a second language acquired early like a mother tongue – lays the foundations for further language learning. It makes excellent biological sense for a new language to piggyback on this open channel of communication. From research evidence drawn from many sources, both empirical and qualitative, it is shown that the absence of meaning where purely monolingual approaches have been used has inevitably resulted in disillusionment and impeded progress for the vast majority of such learners. So at a fi rst level, the mother