THE POWERFUL AND CONTROVERSIAL STRATEGY OF USING STUDENTS’ FIRST LANGUAGE KNOWLEDGE IN FOREIGN LANGUAGE TEACHING

"This study explores the extent to which using the students’ first language in teaching foreign languages is beneficial, and recommends some successful strategies of putting L1 knowledge to good use. Given that it is widely recommended to avoid the use of L1 in favour of monolingual approaches, that provide complete language immersion, it is especially challenging to define the situations when students’ first language can be used as a valuable and beneficial tool to support foreign language learning. Although L1 use is widely discouraged, some researchers suggest that, if used correctly and coherently, it does not hinder, but promotes language learning. In order to establish the extent to which L1 could support foreign language learning, this study sheds light on strategies used during teaching Romanian as a foreign language, aiming to make enlightening connections between L1 and L2, thus exploring the similarities between Romanian and Italian, the mother tongue of the students. The teacher used basic information about etymology, language history and phonetic transformations to explain the connections between words in Romanian and Italian, based on the common Latin inheritance. Moreover, the teacher used brief explanations and informal comments in Italian to build a meaningful relation with the students and create an inclusive, friendly and relaxed environment for language teaching. This comparative linguistics approach was assessed in relation with the results obtained by another class of Italian students, where the teacher made no such linguistic comparisons and avoided use of L1."