MOTHER TONGUE IN ENGLISH LESSONS
The students must feel the language with all their senses and understand that learning a language is just like growing a flower.
By Nevin Ulusoy
It is important to decide why we teach English and what we expect from the students before we start to think about how we will teach them. Will it be enough for us when they learn the grammatical or should they communicate with each other and everybody who can speak English?
“Will it be enough for us when they learn the grammatical or should they communicate with each other and everybody who can speak English?”
If we want to teach only the grammatical rules, then it will be the best to use the mother tongue as much as possible. It is very easy to teach them by comparing the two languages, their grammar and vocabulary, they do not need to feel the target language so much, because it is not a living thing for them and for us. Learning a language is just like building a house made of bricks. Communication is not important and it is a dead language that we teach and the students learn.
Are languages dead really? If we use them for communication in real life, if we express our feelings with languages, how can they be? From the day we start to teach English, we must make students feel this reality that English lessons are not lessons like Maths and they are beyond lessons. The students must feel the language with all their senses and understand that learning a language is just like growing a flower. It is very complicated and it is a living thing, it needs to be looked after and cared. But we have only a classroom to make it and a classroom is not a natural environment to learn a language. In classrooms we have lessons and when we learn a language in a classroom, learning a language is a lesson. The students may be bored very easily, because lessons tend to be boring for students, they are bored of learning rules and formulas.