Using the Mother Tongue by Sheelagh Dellar and Mario Rinvolucri
From: Simon Gill . Originally posted to CETEFL Feb 5, 2004
Using the Mother Tongue by Sheelagh Dellar and Mario Rinvolucri, pub English Teaching professional/Delta, 2002, 96 pp, ISBN 0-954198-61-1: a review by Simon Gill
One of the pleasures of working at a teacher training college is going to schools and watching my students in action on their teaching practice. I am seldom disappointed and often delighted at how, well, teacher-like they look in front of a class. Part of the preparation we give them for this is sending them, once a week for a semester, to a number of local schools to observe classes being taught by their regular teachers. The observations are guided, in that we give them tasks to do, and in order to get the credit for their methodology course they need to submit a file on the classes they’ve seen and their reflections on what went on in them.
One of the topics my colleagues and I deal with quite early on in the methodology course is the role of the native language, in this case Czech, in the foreign language classroom. The position we take is that the mother tongue represents a powerful resource that can be used in a number of ways to enhance learning but that it must always be used in a principled way. To borrow a term from computing, we see English as the ‘default setting’, the language that should generally be used, and that whenever English is not being used there should be a good reason for this.
Recently I was going through a pile of observation files and was struck by how often my students commented negatively on the amount of Czech being used by both the teachers and the kids they saw; several of them actually stated that the learners appeared effectively incapable even of understanding, let alone using, spoken English because they were being given so little experience of either. They, and I, found this horrifying. And not so long ago a Slovak teacher I know went to see a French class in a school in London; she told me that precisely seven words of the target language were used during the entire lesson. There’s a lot of this going on, it seems.
Now, let us turn to the book I have in front of me. There are ‘Personal Prefaces’ by each of the authors: Sheelagh Dellar writes in hers of “the guilt feelings” of teachers who break “the mother tongue taboo” and, in his, Mario Rinvolucri of “the bizarre ban on mother tongue in the foreign language classroom”. Luke Prodromou, in his Introduction, states that “the mother tongue has been used surreptitiously and haphazardly and, as a result, it may not have been used to good effect”. Well, my students and I would certainly agree with the last bit, but I’m not so sure whether guilt, taboos, bans, and surreptitiousness played much of a role in the practice of the teachers my students and my Slovak friend were so disappointed by.
Two extremes, then, each of them equally absurd. At one we have a room full of people who share a tool of massive power and delicacy but conspire to pretend that it doesn’t exist, preferring, as it were, the abacus of their English to the mainframe computer of their Czech, and at the other a group of people who are denied all but the most minimal hands-on experience of the skill they are supposed to be gaining; would you go to a driving school which allowed you to sit in the driver’s seat occasionally but never to turn the ignition key? Although it takes the former extreme, mother-tongue non-use, as its starting-point, this book is one that could also profitably be read by those teachers at the other end of the spectrum, the ones who massively overuse the mother tongue. Subtitled “Making the most of the learner’s language”, it consists of a collection of 115 recipe-style activities, all of which involve the use of the native language(s) of the learners. Some of them require the teacher to be an L1 speaker too, though not necessarily one with a perfect command, but there are others which require no knowledge at all on the part of the teacher. So you wouldn’t, for example, need to speak Czech like Karel Èapek to be able to use this book with a class of Czech learners and, if you teach in a multilingual setting, there’s no need to master the mother tongues of everyone you teach.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Classroom management’, is further subdivided into activities designed to deal with the pros and cons of L1 use, getting groups started, and getting learner feedback. It’s much shorter than the second, ‘Living language’, which has lengthy sections on grammar, vocabulary, receptive and productive skills, and using translation. An index at the front indicates which activities are considered suitable for classes at five different levels of linguistic proficiency, from beginner to advanced; many of them are quite flexible. Rather fewer of them are designed for beginners than for any of the other levels, which is a pity, as it is at this very level that learners are most dependent on their L1.
The activities themselves are presented in an easy-to-follow way. A box at the top indicates the level of proficiency in the learners’ mother tongue required of the teacher, the type and level of class the activity is aimed at, its purpose, and any materials that may be needed. Notes on any necessary preparation are followed by clear step-by-step instructions, with, in some cases, variations being suggested or reference sources mentioned. If you’ve read other books by Mario Rinvolucri (and if you haven’t, you’re probably on some kind of rare and endangered species list) then there are things here you’ll recognize: sentence stems to be completed by learners, dictations of various sorts, storytelling activities, and lateral thinking puzzles such as our old friend the philosopher in the desert who wanted a haircut. But there is much else that, to me at least, was new or at least a new variation on an old theme, and although there are a few things here that strike me as just too contrived to work in any of the classes I teach (is “They take life slowly in Devon” really an ambiguous sentence?), there is such a diversity of ideas on display here that I would defy anyone to fail to find at least some good ideas here for their own classes.
One thing I personally feel is a shortcoming of this book is that there could profitably be more of a general overview of just what the judicious use of the mother tongue has to offer and exactly why, and how, that use should be judicious. This would provide a conceptual framework within which teachers could place the rich variety of practical ideas offered here. I grant that it is possible that teachers who use them may gain a comprehensive understanding of the possibilities principled L1 use can offer, but I fear that all too often the activities may just become part of a bag of tricks and not spill over into a wider recognition of the potential for, and pitfalls of, L1 use in the classroom. Let me go on record here as saying that I would happily volunteer to write such an overview in the event of there being a second edition of this book.
Who is this book for? Like so many other resource books, perhaps it’s not the sort of thing that every single one of us should rush out and buy our very own copy of, but it could certainly hold its head up on any language school’s staffroom bookshelf, in a departmental library, or as part of a local teachers’ association or teacher development group’s stock. It concludes with an Epilogue in which two voices, one a university professor and the other a classroom practitioner, advocate “sensible use of mother tongue in teaching the target language”, a plea with which I would heartily agree, although I would like to have the word ‘sensible’ in bold, italicized, and, for good measure, probably underlined as well. The acknowledgements at the beginning point out that this “could be considered a controversial book”. My Macmillan English Dictionary for Advanced Learners defines ‘controversial’ as “[something] that people disagree about or do not approve of”. The latter seems a tad unlikely here; as the use of the native language has, IMHO, been subject to the kind of uninformed extremism I wrote of above for far too long, the former is greatly to be welcomed. If this book provokes disagreement and, therefore, debate and thought, it will have done a good job. Have a look at it and decide for yourself.