Teachers’ Decision Making on Using L1 in EFL Classrooms in Indonesia
Christine Manara
The monolingual method has been quite popular among
language schools in Indonesia
at the tertiary level. There has been an assumption that the best way of
etaching English is through English. It is believed that the learners can
acquire the target language by providing lots of target language exposure.
However, several scholars (Auerbach, 1993; Cole, 1998; and Lucas and Kantz,
1994) point out that the monolingual approach is more based on political
grounds than on methodological ones. Atkinson (1993) asserts that there is no
more strong theoretical evidence in support for a methodology using 100% target
language (in Hawks, 2001). Therefore, in the past 20 years, the mother tongue
has been promoted to play a small but significant role in the language classroom
of adult EFL learners. This paper, then, reports on a study which explores the teachers’
awareness and decision making in using the mother tongue (L1) in the classroom
in the Indonesian context. The findings revealed that although the teachers
wished to use the target language all the time, L1 was still used for different
purposes in different settings in the EFL classroom. The teachers also voiced a
set of considerations of when to use L1 judiciously.
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Manara, C. (2006,
April). Teachers’
decision making on using L1 in EFL classrooms in Indonesia. Paper presented at the 41st RELC
International Seminar, Singapore.