I became a better language teacher when I asked my students to speak only the language they were learning--and did the same myself. In my brief period teaching high-school Spanish, my students did activities in Spanish. But I didn't think of them as Spanish speakers--even though they were in an intermediate class!
When I moved to teaching adult ESOL, I didn't just change location. I changed attitude. 100% English was the name of the game--and it was only a beginning class. How, and why?
As I've written recently, there are some very good reasons for allowing use of students' native language in a second-language class. It creates a comfort zone--especially for adults already adjusting to a host of new cultural expectations. It makes classroom mechanics go more quickly, freeing up space for learning.
At the end of the day, though, I'm still for 100% immersion.* For a couple reasons.
Why not let students banter in their own language? After all, they can translate a confusing word, explain an instruction not well understood the first time around. Because the kind of classroom where students learn more language is one in which they participate in lots of small-group and pair work and use the "target language" (English in the ESOL setting). The "tidbit" language, small talk, back-and-forth, if it happens in that target language, is very helpful for building skills. How are you? What page are we on? Do you want to go first? Can you pass me a pencil? Don't or doesn't? In fact, it's actually more real than a lot of the language practice that happens in traditional "drills" or speaking activities--the questions are authentic, not out of a book. What's more, when students go back and forth in the target language, they have to adjust the language they use to help each other understand--that's also a very important way of building language skills.
Any classroom has plenty of anecdotes that show this, but there's also research that makes the case. One study I read about showed that students who interacted in the target language in small groups "negotiated meaning" many, many times more than those who weren't working in such groups. It's not side stuff; it's the main stuff.
There's also the familiar slippery slope. If you set the bar to 100%, there are probably going to be moments when folks resort to their native language. As I argued in my previous post on this topic, the job of an adult educator is not to police students. If you ask for 100%, you might get 98%, say--which is pretty good. Set the bar to "let's speak English 95% of the time"--and you'll probably get 90. I remember watching my students, who knew they were trying to hit a high bar, force themselves to "take the hard way out"--use the English phrase they thought they didn't remember, ask the English question they thought they couldn't get out.
Isn't it just too challenging to ask beginning (or intermediate) speakers to understand everything in the target language? In a sense, yes. God, when I was teaching high school, if I'd tried to explain the complex directions I laid out for vocab games, my students' eyes might have glazed over more than they already were (amount of immersion was only one of my struggles; sigh).
Hold yourself to 100% target language as a teacher, though, and it can bring out something finer. The experts say that students who are learning a language from scratch need plenty of pictures, role-plays, models. It makes for hard work. Once I adopted 100% language immersion, I had to keep Occam's Razor on hand at all times: what was the simplest explanation or activity available? What metaphor could I use to display it? Google Images was also my best friend. And Total Physical Response, which I found to be an incredibly effective teaching technique. Lengthy instructions? Better to simplify the task, and model how to do (perhaps using my favorite: Doug Lemov's I/we/you sequence of modeling). Detailed explanations of grammar? Better to structure activities where students listen and observe how language is used in specific settings--perhaps responding physically. I had to bring my teaching to a higher level in order to bring the lessons to students at the right language level.
This isn't to understate the great things that can come from more complex work. While the beginning levels of language learning demand a language-rich, yet straightforward atmosphere, I also had positive experiences integrating substantial role-plays into class. Students might act out being a nurse and a patient at a health clinic. But to get to such complex work, students first need a foundation of grammar and vocab first, a model of what to do (YouTube being another of my best friends), and support as they do it.
Can there be a place for "safety valves" of native-language use? Of course. One semester, students asked to post chart paper on the wall, and write English words they needed translated on it. Later, the translation could be done. Teachers who speak a student's native language can always clarify something during class, after break. Volunteer tutors can sit side-by-side students and intervene when something is just really confusing. But I'd tend to see these as special exceptions.
At the end of the day, I'm for 100% immersion--slightly. Done right, it brings out more in students, and brings out more in teachers.
*N.B. As I pointed out last time around, I'm making a point about language use in a second-language program--I'm not making a point about the merits of bilingual education as a whole. That's a topic for another day.
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