Teachers' Preferences on L1 and L2 Use in Malaysian Primary ESL Classrooms

Abstract

The usage of L1 and L2 in ESL Classrooms has been on an ongoing debate over the decades. As teachers are responsible for the learners’ learning experiences from urban and rural schools in Malaysia, it is crucial to investigate the teachers’ preferences of L1 and L2 usage since there is no apparent agreement on whether L1 hinders or helps in ESL classrooms regardless of massive research efforts. This study attempts to fill the gaps on teachers' preferences on L1 and L2 use in Malaysian primary ESL classrooms of both rural and urban schools. It aims to explore the language preferences of teachers in various situations either L1 or L2 in different settings. The study employs a quantitative approach in which an online survey was done with 30 primary ESL teachers through purposive sampling. 36 from 158 questions of Chavez’s questionnaire are adapted according to the suitability of this study. Data gathered were analysed using frequencies and percentages. The findings show that L2 is used by the respondents from rural and urban primary schools for most situations with slight differences in terms of number of items and percentages. Despite the strong preferences of L2 usage, there are variations of L1 use in certain situations especially for teachers from rural schools. It is shown that teachers are still inclined towards ‘English-only’ approach but L1 remains inseparable in ESL primary classrooms. Thus, future research proposed includes the recommendation for another study to be done on a larger scale of respondents and studies that investigate teachers’ preferences based on specific reasons of switching the language such as translanguaging, code-mixing, code-switching or other diglossic approach.