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oai:figshare.com:article/33914101 2026-10-01T17:52:06Z portal_1197 item_type_12 month_year_10_2026

The use of L1 in English language teaching Jason Anderson (25018423) Philip Kerr (4400845) Translanguaging (Linguistics) Second language acquisition -- Study and teaching English language -- Study and teaching -- Foreign speakers Multilingual education Interlanguage (Language learning) Education, Bilingual Language and education Language and languages -- Study and teaching Migrated from ePrints For much of the 20th century, English language teachers working in Western countries were recommended to teach using only, or mainly, English. Other languages were discouraged or even banned from the classroom (Cook, 2010; Howatt & Widdowson, 2004). Even discussion of the topic was considered, until recently, an ‘elephant in the room’ of English language teaching (ELT) (Levine, 2011, p. 69). Yet since the start of the twenty-first century, there has been a noticeable and widespread shift in Western opinion towards the use of other languages in the classroom, so much so that some scholars are calling this a ‘multilingual turn’ in language teaching (e.g. May, 2014). In other parts of the world (e.g. East and South Asia), other languages played an important role in the English classroom throughout the 20th century, even if Western scholars looked negatively upon such practices (e.g. Grabe & Mahon, 1981). This white paper will discuss the use of other languages in the English language classroom, looking at this topic from methodological and research-based perspectives, discussing the beliefs, needs’ and practices of both teachers and learners. It will also discuss practical classroom implications resulting from this analysis and present a number of techniques, tools and activity types that teachers can use to facilitate learning through the productive use of other languages. 2026-05-19T00:00:00Z Text Preprint 10.82444/warw.33914101 https://figshare.com/articles/preprint/The_use_of_L1_in_English_language_teaching/33914101 CC BY 4.0