Mother tongue in the classroom

THE MOTHER TONGUE IN THE CLASSROOM: cross-linguistic comparisons, noticing and explicit knowledge Vincent Ferrer Abstract The role of the mother tongue in instructed second language acquisition/learning has been the subject of much debate and controversy.... More

THE MOTHER TONGUE IN THE CLASSROOM: cross-linguistic comparisons, noticing and explicit knowledge Vincent Ferrer Abstract The role of the mother tongue in instructed second language acquisition/learning has been the subject of much debate and controversy. This article reports on a piece of research carried out in my own teaching/learning environment (a private English language school in Tarragona, Spain) and presents a comparative study of students’, teachers’ and teacher educators’ perceptions regarding the adequacy of cross-linguistic grammatical comparisons in the monolingual classroom. Results suggest that a judicious and systematic use of cross-linguistic referencing may present the teacher with opportunities for equipping the learners with explicit knowledge of the target language systems. This in turn may help students to notice the gap between the state of their inner grammars and the target language and ultimately aid acquisition. Introduction Throughout much of the histor Less