Use of L1 as a Strategy for Acquisition of English in the Bilingual Indian Context

Abstract

Code-switching/-mixing has enormous pedagogical value in the Indian bilingual context of teaching English and it can promote interactive classroom which is otherwise difficult in an artificial monolingual “English only” classroom. In addition to creating a healthy and encouraging home-like ambiance for interaction in the formal classroom setting, this bilingual approach by learners helps them overcome certain social-psychological problems like cultural disloyalty, negative language attitude, and subconscious language behaviour, and linguistic factors like lexical gap, low level of competence, and communicative inability. Moreover, code-switching/-mixing is a rule-governed behaviour as a result of interaction between two contact languages in society aiding communication in both languages at once. Code-mixing and switching between the home language and English is more beneficial to the acquisition of the latter at phonological, grammatical, lexical, sentence, and discourse levels. It creates awareness in learners of similar and dissimilar linguistic elements and idiomatic expressions between languages. It is also a natural way of learning a second language in multilingual contexts. Some teachers’ attitude toward this natural bilingual phenomenon is negative on the ground that it promotes communication neither in English nor in the home language. They fail to perceive language basically as a social phenomenon and they fear that it will ultimately stunt learners’ growth at the level of subordinate bilingualism, an unfounded fear. The present paper analyzes the attitudes of English teachers toward the use of Tamil as a perfect strategy in the English class that is the home language of the vast majority of English learners both in regional and English medium schools.