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t is not surprising to find that English hasbecome a global language whose influence has reached every corner of the world, and thatnon-native speakers are playing a central role in the expansion of English, thus increasing theimportance of ESL/EFL teaching and learning. Under this circumstances, whether or not touse learners’ mother tongue as an aid in English language classrooms has become anunavoidable choice facing most English language teachers and consequently provoked hotdebates and researches.Over the years, ‘English-only’ policy dominated both the teaching profession and theresearch area. A general view was accepted that the use of mother tongue should be avoidedas a teaching tool. Owing to the influence of the direct method, and more recently, thecommunicative language teaching method, any contact with the mother tongue wasdiscouraged so as to avoid negative transfer from the mother tongue and the exclusive use ofL2 was greatly encouraged in English language teaching classrooms. Any significant relianceon the mother tongue was excluded from most language teaching methodology (Hummel2010:62). It would be true to say that ‘English-only’ instruction has its own historical roots.In U.S., the ‘monolingual ESL instruction’ policy was determined by political as well aspedagogical factors. Pedagogically, Berlitz helped revolutionize learning by introducing oneof the first forms of the direct method, the basic tenet of which is that second languagelearning is similar to first language leaning so that all instructions are given in the targetlanguage (Thanasoulas 2002:2). Politically, to counter the influence from the languageminority residents who were regarded to bring political and economic problems and form athreat to those people’s status as speakers of the dominant language and as members of thedominant culture, the Americanization movement was promoted which established ‘Englishonly’ as the norm in ESL classes (Auerbach 1993:12).Meanwhile, Phillipson (1992:185) argues that ‘English-only’ policy can be traced toBritish neocolonial policies. He claims that ELT was developed as a profession to directlyrespond to a political imperative, which means English was seen to be a key component in thespread of British neocolonial control, and for the purpose, five basic tenets were put forwardin a conference held at Makere University in Uganda in 1961 and became the doctrineunderlying ELT worldwide. These tenets are:·English is best taught monolingually.·The ideal teacher of English is a native speaker.·The earlier English is taught, the better the results.·The more English is taught, the better the results.·If other languages are used too much, standards of English will drop.Moreover, for the two reasons mentioned above, it can be observed that native speakersalmost dominated the profession of English language teaching worldwide. For example, inU.S., most schoolteachers teaching English to non-anglophones were untrained monolingualEnglish teachers (Baron 1990:162). Since the monolingual teachers did not speak thelanguages of the students and the students often spoke several L1s, besides the factor ofpolitical dominance of English, the avoidance of L1 was a practical necessity in much EFLteaching (Phillipson 1992, Cited in Cook 2001a :404).However, more recently, classroom-based research has revealed that teachers alternatebetween using the mother tongue (L1) and the target language (L2) in foreign languageclassrooms (Chang 2009; Ferguson 2003; Ma本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。