On behalf of Ibrar:
Stephen,
From a teaching perspective, translation devices are tools that, when used judiciously, aid the the learning of a second language; just like any teaching aid your website offers.
With regards to using the learners' L1, which I think you were also referring to, people have tended to fall in one of two camps:
1. Those who advocate a strictly monolingual classroom favouring only the L2 (Polia 1994) and subsequently regard usage of learners'
L1 in ESOL classrooms as pedagogically inefficacious.
2. Those who encourage its use. Advocates of this view suggest that the learners' L1 can be used to convey meaning, organise the
class, and scaffold instructional information (Cook 2001).
Personally, I have seen our role as ESOL teachers as partly to encourage our learners to see themselves as true bilinguals, at home in both languages and assuming a type of ownership of their new L2.
In a recent issue of Language Issues Elsa Auerbach (2008) suggests that, rather than acting as 'language police' (p. 51), it is more useful for teachers to pose this issue to students, allowing them to influence the method of their learning, as part of a greater strategy to foster learner autonomy.
As for 'code-switching', it is prevalent in 'normal' speech amongst bilingual and diglossic groups and of course ESOL learners; it's natural and part of many learners' "interlanguage" coping strategies (see Appel and Muysken 1987).
Anyway that's what I think, and I'd appreciate any other views from other practitioners. (References below)
Ibrar
Appel, R. and P. Muysken (1987) Language Contact and Bilingualism, London: Edward Arnold.
Auerbach, E. (2008) "Autonomy and democracy in language education", Language Issues, 1 9: 1, 50-5 7.
Cook, V. (2001) "Using the First Language in the Classroom", The Canadian Modern Language Review/La Revue Canadienne des Languages Vivantes, 5713: 402-23.
Polio, C. (1994) "Comments on Elsa Roberts Auerbach's 'Reexamining English Only in the ESL Classroom'", TESOL Quarterly 28/ 1: 153-161.
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