Chapter 4. Target Language Use in English Classes in Hungarian Primary Schools

Perceived-target-language-use survey in the English classrooms in China: investigation of classroom-related and institutional factors

“…This pattern is contradictory to what is commonly expected of a progressive increase in the amount of TL use from the junior secondary level through the senior secondary level to the university level when students are more fluent in the TL after acquiring the language for a longer time. A higher mean amount of TL use was reported at the junior secondary level, which might be because the classroom activities at this level tended to be repetitive and predictable, such as the demonstrating-mimesispractice-performance approach and choral repetition (Jin and Cortazzi 2006;Pérez-Milans 2012), which favoured the use of the TL (Nagy and Robertson 2009). On the other hand, the significant drop in the amount of TL use from the JS to the SS-PS might be due to the reason that much of the class time was used for preparing students to sit for the university entrance exams and low priority was given to developing students' communicative competence (M. Li 2010; M. Li and Baldauf 2011).…”

“…Recent empirical studies that quantified the amount of L1 use in EFL classrooms varied considerably in their findings. Nagy and Robertson (2009) analysed four EFL lessons delivered by different Hungarian teachers in four Hungarian primary schools, and found that the teachers of two elementary EFL lessons used the L1 for a mean of 18.8% in terms of total word count in their teacher talk, while the other two teachers of two intermediate EFL lessons used the L1 for a mean of 44.4%. D. Liu et al (2004) analysed the recorded 50-minute lessons delivered by 13 Korean high-school teachers of English from three different cities in South Korea and found that their use of L1 as a proportion of the total number of words spoken ranged from only 10% (in a 'model lesson' intended to demonstrate English teaching skills) to as much as 90%, with an average of 40%.…”

“…On the other hand, whereas Tian and Kunschak (2014) reported using the L1 only 9.5% and 11.1% of time in the teacher talk by two Chinese EFL teachers during their lessons to non-English major students in a prestigious university in Beijing, Zhou (2011) found an average of 26.5% and 48.6% of L1 use in terms of time in the teacher talk by two other Chinese EFL teachers over four and five skill-based lessons, respectively, to English majors in another prestigious university in China. The amounts of L1 use in the teacher talk in these studies were attributed to various factors, such as students' willingness to use the TL (Humphries and Stroupe 2014), students' English proficiency (D. Liu et al 2004;Tian and Kunschak 2014;Zhou 2011), teachers' English proficiency (D. Liu et al 2004;Zhou 2011), teachers' beliefs about classroom language use and codeswitching (Tayjasanant and Robinson 2014), teachers' assessments of the cognitive and linguistic demands of reading texts on students (Nagy and Robertson 2009), activity type (Nagy and Robertson 2009), lesson type (Tian and Kunschak 2014;Zhou 2011) and the assessment format of public examinations (D. Liu et al 2004). These factors can be glossed as learner-related (e.g.…”

“…This quantitative finding was consistent with the results of the qualitative analysis conducted by Dailey-O'Cain and Liebscher (2009) on the interactions among students of German and their instructors in two German language classrooms at a Canadian university, which indicated that students developed naturalistic codeswitching practices even when the teachers maximised their TL use. Regarding how the amount of TL/L1 use may differ in different activity types, recent findings from both the self-reported data of the amount of TL use at university level (Levine 2003) and the in-depth analyses of recorded FL lessons at primary and Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development 3 secondary school levels (Nagy and Robertson 2009;Kim and Elder 2005) indicated that the TL was the preferred code for activities where the use of language was repetitive, formulaic and predictable (Nagy and Robertson 2009); medium-oriented relating to teaching and learning the TL itself (Kim and Elder 2005); or structured or scripted as in textbook activities (Levine 2003). On the other hand, the L1 was favoured by class members when the interactions were non-routine (Nagy and Robertson 2009), complicated (Kim and Elder 2005) or unstructured or unscripted as in discussing course policies, tests, assignments and L2 grammar (Levine 2003).…”

Language alternation and language norm in vocational content and language integrated learning

“…e.g. Cook 2001;McMillan and Turnbull 2009;Nagy and Robertson 2009;Turnbull 2001). Some propagate the sole use of the TL, whereas others argue that a certain amount of the L1 is needed for sense making to be possible.…”