It is the case of where all the students and the teacher share the same home language. The students and teachers report that they (the teachers) have the habit of using home language when explaining even the very simple concepts. What does it mean? I want to know if there is any literature that discusses this issue.
Home language meaning learners' native language? If this is the case, students exposure to the English language is limited so will their ability to learn the skills of EFL.
Uma Nath Sharma
Take a look at:
Enric Llurda‘s Non-Native Language Teachers: Perceptions, Challenges and Contributions to the Profession. 2005
George Braine‘s Non-native Educators in English Language Teaching. 2013
Using the native language up to a certain extent it is not improper at all, ever since students and teachers share that language, but only as a feedback when dealing with some extremely complicated issues or tópicos in Advanced Classes, never for beginners!
"EFL teachers report that they are habitual of using home language in EFL classroom"
... It usually means that they are teaching in a monolingual country, where the school teacher has the same language as the students. Being this the case, it means that they communicate in the social language (L1) even in the target langange class (L2 class).
It they were in a bilingual or plurilingual country, teachers could have different languages than the students', and every family could have different home languages too.
https://tpls.academypublication.com/index.php/tpls/article/view/854/619
Overusing mother tongue (L1) in foreign or second language (L2) classes is irrational. It could limit learners’ opportunities to L2 exposure and thus deprive them of practicing and acquiring different aspects of L2. It could also contribute to language interference (i.e., negative transfer), resulting in students’ fossilization of errors. That being noted, a sensible and rationalized use of L1 in L2 classes could have benefits on students’ L2 development during their learning process. You might check out Pulido (2021) and Wodniecka et al. (2018) for relevant recent insights.
Pulido, M. F. (2021). Native language inhibition predicts more successful second language learning: Evidence of two ERP pathways during learning. Neuropsychologia, 152, 107732. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2020.107732
Wodniecka, Z., Szewczyk, J. M., Kałamała, P., Mandera, P., & Durlik, J. (2018). When a second language hits a native language. What ERPs (do and do not) tell us about language retrieval difficulty in bilingual language production. Preprint. [Preprint]. PsyArXiv. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/yqp8t
Good luck,
There are many challenges that the teacher faces in the classroom, but if you mean in the Corona pandemic or in the class that requires attending both, challenges need to know the level of students as the first step for assessment.
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