Mother Tongues and Teaching English as a Foreign Language: A Case Study

Abstract

This paper examines the role of mother tongues in the teaching of English as a foreign language at the University of Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The purpose of the study is to determine the perfect mother tongue of students and to evaluate the efficacy of translanguaging methods in the teaching of English as foreign language. The research used three types of data, including quantitative, qualitative, and test data, as well as a survey conducted among 250 students at the Faculty of Arts. The results of the study suggest that translanguaging methods should be adopted to meet the needs of the country, particularly when English is combined with one of the local languages or French, in order to improve the understanding of students and their academic performance, particularly for those Congolese Learners of English who are not exposed to English often. The main problem in this study is that the learners at the University are learning English as an academic subject and a medium of instruction that they do not understand very well. However, the concept of’mother tongue’ (MT) is very important in learning other languages including a foreign language. This is especially true for students who live in a multilingual environment like DRC who have to follow and understand certain subjects taught in English. Most of them do not have their own unique and same mother tongue. For example, there are situations where a person speaks two basic languages, one is Congolese and the other is a second language. For example, someone who has been extensively exposed to a non-Congolese language like French since birth in addition to their Congolese language.