Teachers' use of students' first language in primary school English as a foreign language classroom : a study of Russian-language school in Estonia

Date

2018

Journal Title

Journal ISSN

Volume Title

Publisher

Tartu Ülikool

Abstract

This thesis is a study of teachers' use of students' mother tongue (Russian) in English-language classrooms in one Russian-language school in Estonia. The aim of the study is to find out the amount and functions of the mother tongue use by the teachers in the primary English as a foreign language classroom. In order to gain the data for the study, three primary classroom English language lessons were observed and analysed in detail using the word-count method and the functional analysis of the teachers' utterances. Lesson observations were followed by the semi-structured interviews with the teachers. The teachers' answers about their classroom practice were compared to the observation data. The Introduction of this study provides a brief insight into the topic of the role of the first language in foreign language teaching, presents the rationale for the research and gives an overview of the structure of the paper. The first chapter discusses the findings of the previous research concerning the amount and the main purposes for using the first language in the English as a foreign language classroom. The second chapter gives an overview of the participants, the data gathering methods and its analysis. The third chapter focuses on presenting and analysing the lesson observation data and the interviews with the teachers. The fourth chapter provides an evaluation of the research findings in the light of previous research. The Conclusion summarises the findings of the study.

Description

Keywords

inglise keel, vene keel, emakeel, võõrkeeleõpetus, algkoolid

Citation