The amount of first language usage

60 languages including East Asian languages such as Korean, Japanese, Mandarin; Near Eastern languages, such as Arabic, Berber, Hebrew; and Germanic languages, such as Dutch, German, Swedish) and the first language (English) in 13 different language classes at the University of California. They tape recorded two 50-minute class sessions for each language. The technique applied in their study for calculating the target language and the first language input amount was the 15-second technique, which means that they noted which language was used every 15 seconds, and then calculated the percentage of the target language and the first language usage amount. They found that instructors’ first language use varied widely from 0% to 90%. One

noticeable result was that six out 13 instructors used less than 10% of the first language in their teaching.

A great divergence in usage of first language usage amount was reported in several other studies. Kim and Elder (2005) examined language choices made by seven secondary-school teachers in four foreign language (French, German, Japanese, and Korean,) classrooms in five Auckland secondary schools in New Zealand. There were two teachers for French, German, Korean respectively, and one teacher for Japanese. Two of the teachers had only three years of teaching experience at the time of the research; the other teachers had more than seven years’ teaching experience. The

student participants were all 13 or 14 years old. Most of them had very little contact with the target language communities and were native speakers of English. A few non-English native speaking students were not the native speakers of the foreign

61 languages to be taught. The class size was between 16 to 26 students. The results showed that the seven teachers, who were native-speaker of Japanese, Korean, German and French, used exclusively between 12% and 77% of the students’ first

language (English) 10% and 66% of the time in their classrooms. Five of the seven teachers used the first language more than 30% of the time; four of the seven used the first language more than 40% of the time; and two of them used the first language more than 60% of the time.

Turnbull (1999) did not directly quantify the amount of first language usage, but he quantified the target language (French) used by four Grade-9 teachers from four different schools in a core French programme in eastern Canada where English was the first language. All of these four teachers were native speakers of English and had between ten and 22 years of teaching experience. Student participants were purposively selected from intact classes of the participating teachers. Most of the 81 student participants in these four classes had been exposed to at least five years (approximately 540 hours) of core French at the beginning of the research. The researcher conducted an in-depth observation over eight weeks. He did not report directly the amount of the first language used by teachers but his results showed that four teachers used the target language (French) exclusively 89%, 54%, 28% and 9% of the time.

62 (2001) study examined the amount of the first language (English) usage by six student teachers of French who taught students aged from 11 to14 years in four secondary schools in southern England. Students had learned French for one, two and three years respectively at the time the research was conducted. The researcher video-recorded 14 lessons and interviewed the six student teachers. The researcher coded the content of video-recordings at each 5 second intervals, then the 5-second sampling data were analysed by using the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) version 9.0 program (SPSS Version 9.0, 1999). The results indicated that the highest amount of first language usage by the six student teachers was 15.2% and the lowest was 0%, with an average of 4.8% of the total lesson time. In only two lessons, the teacher’s

(the same teacher in the two lessons) first language usage amount was more than 10%.

De La Campa and Nassaji (2009) conducted a study in two classes of the same second-year German as a foreign language course at an Anglophone university in Canada. Each class contained 18 students aged from 18 to 55. The classes were taught by two native German teachers. One was an experienced teacher who had taught for 20 years at the time the study was conducted, the other was a novice teacher with very little teaching experience. The course was designed for students, who wanted to improve their oral skills in German. The researchers collected three sources of data: video and audio recordings of the German classes, teachers’ interviews, and stimulated recall sessions immediately following the class recordings. To determine the amount of the first language (English) and the second language (German) usage

63 by the two teachers, the researchers used a word count of both languages. The results showed that the overall usage of the first language (English) by the two German teachers was 11.3%. The experienced teacher used slightly less first language than the novice teacher: 9.3% compared to 13.2%. In addition, no significant difference was found by a Chi-square test.

Rolin-Ianziti and Brownlie (2002) reported similar findings. They examined the first language (English) usage of four foreign language (French) teachers in five classes at the University of Queensland in Australia. The study was carried out in the first semester of the beginners’ course in French. Two French teachers were native

speakers of English, and the other two were French native speakers. Most students were English native speakers, and a small number of overseas students who had high English proficiency levels were also included into this study. The researchers chose the method of counting the number of words in both English and French to calculate the amount of these two languages used due to the syntactic similarities between English and French. Their findings showed that one teacher did not use the first language at all; the other three teachers used the first language respectively 4.32%, 12.75% and 18.15%.