Dear Hossein Navidinia,

Thank you for the interesting question. Generally speaking, the use of translation has long been viewed  as an impediment to foreign language learning because it reduces the time on task and output principles, which play a pivotal role in language learning ( Nation & Macalister, 2010) . In point of fact, translation and foreign language teaching/learning have been regarded as wrong bedfellows. However, my personal experiences in upper intermediate and advanced classes tell me a different story. In practice, translation provides a useful pedagogical tool by which certain aspects of language can be transformed to learners very effectively. As a case in point, teaching meta-discourse markers is made possible by providing L1 instruction. For more information, I refer you to the following link, which can hopefully shed light on what you are looking for.

Best regards,

R. Biria

https://www.cttic.org/ACTI/2006/papers/Carreres.pdf

I totally agree with the statement that the use of translation in foreign language teaching has had both pros and cons. I reckon, activities based on giving equivalents in students' mother tongue or giving explanations on tricky grammar can hardly be called 'translation' for the reason that it is a special skill or art which can only be acquired by way of a long term instruction at the university level. 

I think that translation can have value for vocabulary understanding and definition of L2 words, particularly for beginners.  But as the student advances, there should be less and less L1 use.

I agree with Michael. L1 is an added value in what concerns vocabulary and grammar, although I'm totally against it because translating english grammar to portuguese may be very misleading, but sometimes I find it necessary to engage learners in specific activities. Again, for beginners and pre-intermediate levels is OK but as they progress, translation should be used less and less.

I would rather think towards translanguaging as the guiding concept. I feel the strict view on not using any L1 at all is not up-to-date anymore, but pros and cons would have to be considered carefully for the very teaching situation;

Thank you for a very important and effective question. Translation method is the easy method to a language learner student. Students can easily understand the matter.Students translates each word and sentence in to the mother tongue and they comfort to translate this. This is one of the simplest way of teaching a foreign language.The students understand the things very easily if taught using this method. This Translation Method is very useful for the average and below-average students. But it has some disadvantage like- No oral takes place is this translation method. The main focus remains only on the mother-tongue and the target language remains ignored.No Speaking in the target language is possible. The only thrust remains on the reading.Main emphasis is given on the Rules of Grammar.

Dear Friends,

    Psycholinguistic research has definitively shown that, up to (and in some cases including) the level of real fluency, translation takes place in the brain of the learner/ user. It is an old fantasy that, past early childhood in a state of total immersion, L2 learning is like L1 learning. Children are born pre-programmed to learn the language or languages they regularly hear around them and interact in. Some children are thus blessed to have more than one "native language" -- they are coordinate bilinguals. The rest of us are classified as compound bilinguals (or multilinguals), and the L2 is stored in the brain through a connection with the L1. The old behaviorist psychological idea that "time on task" supported isolated untranslated instruction was a serious mis-application of the idea (which certainly applies to many skills). Doubtless no real psychologist ever tried to test the idea of trying to learn an L2 minus translation! I was once subjected to a 6-week course of instruction in Turkish which consisted solely of repeating sentences in Turkish for 45 minutes a day with no translation provided or allowed. Everyone in the class dropped at the end of the course, unable to use any of the hundreds of sentences which had been practiced so intensively. (Of course they could go around saying these in public, but random meaningless utterances would make people think they were crazy.) 

   The opposite extreme (which I have rehearsed on this site several times), was a Korean PhD student in the English department here in my university. He had a BA and an MA in English from a Korean university, but in all of his years of study, he had never been taught through the medium of English. Not surprisingly, his oral English was very halting, but the quality of his writing, and the depths of his analysis of English literature, strongly surpassed any of the native English speakers in our PhD program. My own experience with Spanish instruction in middle school and high school, and continuing in college, with ALL instruction and discussion entirely in English (Spanish being used only for translation activities) enabled me to undertake graduate study in Mexico in anthropology ENTIRELY in Spanish, and even my Mexican fellow students sometimes asked me for help with writing formal Spanish. 

    Scientific psycholinguistic research thus demonstrates, and these examples show, the importance of translation in the earlier and middle (and the value even at advanced) levels. Unless students are being prepared for careers in which they will be expected to interact orally with speakers of English (as tour guides, receptionists, etc.), it is folly and highly inefficient to waste their time on oral development, when receptive competence, especially in reading, will serve 90% of them far better. University students in all areas except English (or other foreign language)will receive most or all of their instruction entirely in their native language, but in most scientific fields, and many others as well, they will have to read books and articles in English. Reading fluency should thus be the #1 priority of all earlier instruction, to prepare students for what they really need. So translation should be an essential tool at all levels. 

  --Rudy Troike

The role of first language in second language learning continues to be the subject of heated debate. Some claim that any reference to the learner’s first language(L1) has detrimental effects on second language(L2) acquisition. On the contrary, others argue that second language learner’s L1 is a resource that can be used to accelerate the process of second language learning. Those who argue that the use of learner’s first language helps SLA too do not offer a generally accepted theoretical framework that language teachers can use in the second language classroom.

Research findings show that the beginner level adults who learn the target language grammar using their L1 in a limited manner significantly improve their grammatical competency.

I think we should accept that translation is a primordial linguistic function for just about everyone.

If I am abroad and don't know the language and see a street sign, I say to my companion: What does that say?

That's translation.

If I am in a store overseas with a native speaker and the clerk says something that I didn't catch, I say to my companion "What did she say?"

When I worked as an interpreter with the police force in a certain state of the United States,  if I spoke to a defendant or witness the officers asked me "What did he say?"

That's translation.  

That's translation. It's a basic function of language knowledge.  Often students who are taught by a pseudo-communicative methodology are unable to tell someone else what a listening or written text says. 

That's bad teaching.

In the elementary stages of learning, I think it favorable because it saves time and effort and to be more secure. In later time, the teacher supposed to exchange it by physical responses to clarify meaning. 

Dear Liqaa,

    My point in repeated posts to this site is that, unless a teacher knows that his or her students are definitely destined, or need, to use conversational language, there is really no need ever to use the second language in instruction. Learning to read the second language fluently is the most important goal, which will offer life-time benefits. There is absolutely no need to make L2 learning a guessing game by having to use physical demonstration, since different students might infer different meanings from a pantomime, and unless the teacher somehow discovers this through a translation check, or through obvious misuse of the item, those misinterpretations will become permanent. 

  That said, a valuable form of exercise for intermediate and advanced learners is how to infer meanings from contexts. When reading, even native speakers sometimes encounter words they have never seen before (this has happened to me several times recently!) and must figure out the probable meaning (or stop to look the item up in a good dictionary -- another important skill to learn and utilize). The hypothesis we form can strongly affect our whole understanding of a text. This is true of L1 learners in their own language as well as L2 learners. My own 11-year-old twins, now in the 6th grade, frequently encounter new words in reading books in school, and often just continue reading, sometimes misunderstanding the text (as I discover when I ask them the meaning of these words -- occasionally their interpretation is even the opposite of that intended). Unfortunately they rarely stop to think that they might not know t he meaning of the term or phrase (often the metaphorical extension of the original meaning), and take time to look it up in a dictionary.  So a teacher, whether of L1 or L2, should constantly be checking, through translation, students' comprehension of new words or phrases, or new uses of familiar words. Just because a student already "knows" a word does not mean that it will always be interpreted correctly in a new context. (This, of course, is especially crucial in recognizing sarcasm!)

   I strongly suspect that most of the recipients of the Nobel prize in the last 50 years have learned the L2 that is crucial to their work through grammar-translation, not by a communicative or direct-method approach.

    Rudy 

Dear Rudy

Thank you in advance for your feedback. In fact, I agree with you in most of your writing concerning checking the right meaning. I like to mention that I live in EFL context so in addition to promote communication we need to clarify meaning for little students. They need to accumulate knowledge of meaning to stand alone as good communicators. 

I don't know if anyone else mentioned this, but in case they didn't, I will point out that translation as a pedagogical tool is only possible when all students share the same L1. As someone who taught Spanish and French in monolingual anglophone societies, I keep having to remind myself that I was privileged in having a common L1 to use or not use as I pleased.  Many teachers throughout the world have students in the same class who speak diverse L1s.  Therefore, no translation possible.

David,

   Point well taken. However, I've found that with the spread of technology, students in mixed-L1 classes often quickly consult their tablets or laptops to check on the meaning of a word they are unsure of, so this can take care of many L1 backgrounds. A useful classroom exercise in that situation is to ask students to tell what the (English) translation is, to see if they all got the right meaning. Not infrequently, multiple translations are given, and students might not choose the appropriate one for the context. 

    Back in the day of paper and pencil work, when reading a text with new words in it, I would list all of the corresponding meanings given in my dictionary, and when I got through with a sentence, I would scan the list and choose the translation which made the most sense in the context. 

    --Rudy

Dear Hossein Navidinia,

Obviously, opinions greatly differ. I agree with those above who think that L1 should be avoided in L2 classrooms. As a person with more than 20 years of teaching EFL experience, I can assure you that translation only hampers the L2 fluency process. First of all, L1 and L2 may be completely different in terms of grammar and ways of expressing abstract ideas (such as metaphors, idioms or collocations). It happens sometimes that there are no equivalents between L1 and L2, not only in terms of grammar but also in vocabulary. What is the point in trying to translate them then? The result is confusion and attempts to "translate" word for word their thoughts in their mother tongue into L2, which on most occasions leads to a lot of errors, and does not help them learn or master L2. I think that L2 learners need to be exposed to natural target language as much as possible. Natural L2 gives learners the necessary models to imitate, build and try hypotheses about the language constructs, and generalise, based on their L2 use.

I can see above the real argument here is between the claims of Chomsky's Universal Grammar and the latest claims of Cognitive Linguistics and Psycholinguistics. Let me just say that generative grammar is "out of date". The research I have been doing in the last five years or so made me realise that "immersion" in the target L2, accompanied by a lot of language use in meaningful social interaction (not translation) is the most effective way to master a foreign language.

What is claimed above about the viatal role of reading comprehension might be true about developing literacy skills in L1 or L2 in bilingual societies, but I dare say, this is not so efficient in EFL learning. It only builds "passive knowledge" which, if not practiced, is quickly and easily forgotten.And I do not believe that a person who can barely speak a foreign language might be an excellent writer in L2. While teaching in the UK, I have come across students who claimed the same (very poor at speaking but submitting excellent coursework). The truth was they had their assignments written by native speakers.

Hope you can find your own "truth" based on your L2 learning and  teaching experience. Wish you the best of luck!

Mariana

Dear Mariana,

    As I said earlier, it is psycholinguistic research -- having nothing to do with Chomsky -- that has shown clearly that in the early stage for all learners, and for many learners even in advanced stages of L2 acquisition, mental translation is the basic internal process used. You can consult the work of Judith Kroll, the leading researcher in this field, to see the evidence. 

    Whether one thinks that generative grammar is "out of date" is a matter of opinion. Here at the University of Arizona, and at MIT, and many other places, including the University of London, Chomsky's latest version of generative grammar, the Minimalist Program, is the dominant theoretical model. If you check international conferences on the Linguist List, you will also see that this is true in many other places. This is where the "cutting edge" of most research is going on. Whether or not it has direct relevance to L2 acquisition or pedagogy is another matter. 

   I'll repeat what I said before -- if one is trying to develop oral fluency in an L2, then practice in the oral use of L2 is essential. But in most cases, this is not the most useful goal, as it is highly inefficient, and carries students the least way into usable knowledge of the L2. Here at our university, I have found that after 2 years of Spanish study, based on a communicative approach with little grammar, most students only two years later have lost 90% of what they had studied. In my case, having learned Spanish without ever using it except for class exercises, after 5 years of not studying or hearing the language, I was able to begin graduate study in Mexico entirely in Spanish, and had no difficulty with it. However, I was not able to use the language socially, and still can't do so easily, even after living in Mexico for three years. I can read professional research reports in Spanish easily, though students trained only in a communicative approach cannot, though they might be able to buy food in the market or chat with friends at a party more easily than I can. The ultimate goal of instruction is thus paramount in the choice of a curriculum.

    Rudy

Dear Rudy,

I didn't mean to start an argument. I have only expressed my opinion, based on my  long teaching EFL experience and the experience I've had as a learner myself. While doing research in the last few years, mainly on factors influencing L2 acquisition, I have come across a lot of different views and opinions, and as a result, my own view on the matter has evolved.

Regarding translation, though, as an EFL  teacher, I am convinced that it DOES NOT help the mastery of L2. That's that.

Best regards,

Mariana

Dear Mariana,

    Thanks for your response -- our own experience always informs our own views, and mine has been the opposite. One strong recommendation I have always given my students is that everyone who teaches a foreign language should put themselves in the learner's seat at least every five years (the amount of time psychologists have shown that it takes for people to forget their experiences), with a language that preferably is radically different from one's own, or the language one has been teaching, so that it is not easy to rely on cognates/ borrowings or familiar structures. I have tried to follow my own advice (not successfully every five years, though!), and I have found that I have learned more by becoming a totally ignorant student again than from all my own years of teaching. Becoming the recipient of different teaching approaches and different teachers gives me a different perspective on what works (at least for me) and what doesn't. I would strongly encourage everyone who is following this thread to do this, and to keep a regular log or diary of your experience, preferably written while the experience is still fresh. It would be exciting if a thread could be started with various people sharing their experiences as they go through the process.  A collaborative book might even come out of these pooled insights. (One thing I discovered is that I am a poor language learner!)

    With best wishes,

    Rudy

Thank you all for your informative answers

Dear Hossein,

actually, to my view the use of first language is not only harmful but also turns up as impediment to the process of learning. considering the translation of phrases within the first language of the learners; first it will get them into  a bad habit and dependency of hearing, learning, and being taught in their first language. considering my own experiment and some colleagues visiting in discrepant number of conferences, the amalgamation of L1 and L2 has shown a boundless enthusiasm for thinking in the L1 language then translating into another language. here there have been two other problems; 1. wasting time to find the exact and related words for the new phrase in L2. 2. sacrificing both fluency and accuracy. second shall go to the simple discussion of psychological and mental process of learning a language by a child within the community of L1. simply, it could be discussed that a child has been learning with out any language assistance. they endeavour to learn and pick up by understanding the situation and contextual issues. therefore, no assistance of any languages exist beside. soon or later they will show a great comprehension about L1, properly.

unfortunately, in our country and educational system the idea of second language as means of second language has no place to stand.

Mother tongue is considered advantageous for a great number of learners all over the world because it is strongly tied up with learners’ preferred strategies of learning.

hi,

resourceful and informative teachers are able to use all the resources available appropriately. professional teachers reflect on the use of L1 in their classes. if it works in the specific context, it is applicable. in spite of some taboos related to L1 use due to direct method and audiolingual views, practicality and particularity can determine the value of l1 use in some complicated situations. best

Thank you all for sharing your experience and expertise

In the light of my own 30 year experience as an English language teacher I would like to contribute to the debate with some hints related to the problem. It is not possible to exclude your native language from learning, no matter how hard you try.

Learners will relate a new language to their own mother tongue. I you forbit them, they will do it in their own minds! Translation tasts DO evoke more interference errors that other forms of class activities but if you, as a teacher, help them understand that translation word-to-word is not the best option, they will finally understand that languages are unique.

Translating back and forth between your native language and the target language forces noticing differences between languages and strongly awakens students’ awareness. Remember that noticing does not automatically guarantee acquisition, but language cannot be learned it isn’t first noticed.

The main reasons behind monolingual approach in classes owe mainly to commercial or even political imperatives than to linguistics as science.

http://www.scielo.org.co/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S0123-46412010000200007

https://translationjournal.net/journal/58education.htm

Hossein Navidinia, Good Luck.

As a practice and pedagogical tool, translation is seldom discussed in rhetoric and composition. This is even though the works of many important rhetoricians have found their way to English readers because of translation. That rhetoric and composition scholarship has yet to include a robust and explicit examination of how the field of translation studies and itself have much to gain from one another amounts to an omission I wish to rectify in this dissertation. To begin the discussion, I offer a brief history of translation studies and some of its theoretical dispositions in this chapter. I examine the relationship between translation studies and rhetoric and composition and highlight how they have informed one another. To situate my discussion of rhetoric and composition and translation studies’ relationship, I link translation and translation pedagogy in the composition classroom to rhetoric and composition’s conceptions of translingualism and translingual pedagogies. Informed by interdisciplinary scholars, I define key terms that will appear throughout this research and offer multiple vantage points from which to understand these terms.