Extensive own-language use: a case study of tertiary English language teaching in China

Abstract

Recent literature on language teaching has questioned the established view that a language is most effectively taught monolingually, arguing instead that the student’s own language has an important role to play, and this view is now widely accepted. While this literature draws attention to the extremism of some monolingual approaches, and advocates a judicious use of the own language, it often neglects the many educational contexts in which a very high proportion of teaching is conducted in the students’ own language. This article addresses this issue and adds to the growing literature on classroom own-language use and its pedagogic functions by examining an instance of such large-quantity use of the own language in an ‘intensive reading’ tertiary English-language course in China. Through analysis of lesson transcripts and interviews with participants, it documents the uses and functions of Chinese, and teacher and student attitudes to it. It also discusses speculatively how the large-scale use of Chinese relates to the aims of the Chinese curriculum, western influences, the textbooks, and teaching style: all matters which merit further research.