An Investigation Into The Respective Use Of L1 And L2 In Middle School EFL Classrooms

As an important parameter in the foreign language pedagogy, medium language is widely used in teaching process. It mainly contains the mother tongue and the target language. Now a controversial issue in the foreign language teaching is that which kind of language can be used as the medium language. In the past two decades, because of the thought that the mother tongue makes a negative influence on the foreign language learning, limiting the use of the mother tongue has been in vogue. However, as a matter of fact, the outcomes of English teaching in the middle school are not as satisfied as expected, so how to use the medium language appropriately is still an objective of research.This study aims to explore the distributional patterns of L1 and L2 in EFL classroom and the influencing factors in language choosing. The data of the study are from three aspects, including classroom observation, interviews and questionnaires,among which the classroom observation serves as the main source of data.The findings of the study fall into the following aspects. First, influenced by many interactive factors, L1 is still used by teachers in EFL classrooms. Second, most students and teachers approve of the judicious use of L1, because it could help the students learn L2 well. Third, teachers mainly use L1 to explore grammar points and translation. Based on the analysis of the data, this study concludes that L1 plays a complementary and facilitative role in EFL classrooms, so teachers should take many aspects into account in choosing the teaching language, including the need of students,teaching environment, and the capability of teachers. Some pedagogical implications of the study are finally provided at the end of the study.