THE USE OF FIRST LANGUAGE IN LIMITED ENGLISH PROFICIENCY CLASSES: GOOD, BAD OR UGLY?

Abstract

There has been an ongoing debate among language teachers on whether to use students’first language (L1) in second language (L2) teaching. Nevertheless, the use of L1 in L2teaching has been advocated with grounded theory as far as it merits the situation. Thisresearch article aims to investigate the effectiveness of the use of L1 to generate ideas forsecond language writing among low proficiency ESL learners. The study employed theexperimental research design where students in the experimental group used BahasaMelayu in generating ideas before they resumed writing their essays in English. Studentsin the control group used English. Two independent raters graded the essays and thescores were analysed using the paired t-test. The findings showed a marked improvementin the writing performance of students who used their first language to generate ideasbefore using their second language for writing. Based on the findings, we recommendthat teachers encourage the use of first language before writing or composing in Englishespecially among low-level proficiency ESL learners.