Mother tongue and translation in the foreign language classroom: Two harmful resources?

Abstract

Mother tongue (MT) and translation have been two undervalued resources in foreign language (FL) classrooms since the rise of monolingual methods. However, already in the 21st century, the Council of Europe promotes the adoption of plural approaches to language teaching (see Candelier et al., 2013), in which the teacher may work with the entire linguistic repertoire found within the classroom, including the MT. Therefore, our aim in this article is to review and reassess the criticisms that claim that MT and translation slow down the learning of the new language with the aim of moving away from this position and defending the importance of these two resources in today's classrooms, in which adopting pluralistic approaches for teaching a FL is recommended.