Teaching English Through Translation

TEACHING ENGLISH THROUGH TRANSLATION

‘Translation is a valid tool for language instruction’

This TEFL Assignment is about teaching English for international communication. Do you think that the use of translation in the language classroom can help improve communication in English?

Translation can easily be used in a communicative classroom because I think that students understand betterwhat you are teaching to them if you shift from Spanish into English, and the other way round, from English into Spanish.

The ideal situation would be a classroom in which all students could participate actively all the time in the target language, in this case, English. However, from my own experience in almost all levels of learning (primary students, secondary students and higher educationstudents) in a Spanish environment (classes with only native Spanish speaker students) there is a need for understanding in the process of communication. If the students do not understand what the teacher is asking them from the very beginning it would be very difficult for the students to communicate and interact in a proper way between each other. The same would happen if they do not understandtheir partners. Therefore, the main purpose of the communicative environment, that is to say the act of communication, would be threatened and the activities posed to them would be a waste of time and effort as well as a very disappointing experience for the students. The objectives would not be achieved either.

The question therefore would be: do they really improve their proficiency inEnglish with translation activities? It depends on some factors. Depending on the proficiency or level that students have, more attention should be paid to translation or not. I think that pre-intermediate and intermediate levels are the best ones for the use of the translation tools because that is the time when students build their grammatical relationships or bonds between their own language (L1) andthe target language (L2). They can compare them and improve their proficiency because the common errors or mistakes can easily be contrasted with the help of translation activities that move from L1 to L2. In the elementary and beginners levels, I think we should not pay much attention to translation, more concretely if we are dealing with primary students aged from four to twelve years old. Moreattention should be paid the act of communication and we should try to expose the students to English as much as possible. In the upper-intermediate and advanced levels, we have two options. We can use translations as a tool for the better understanding of both languages, in this case, with the use of translation activities moving from L2 to L1. In these situations, the objectives would beoriented to sentence structure activities, idioms, colloquialisms, false friends, collocations or style activities, which are more adequate to these levels. If students success on this type of activities, it can also create a sense of achievement and improvement within the students, motivating them even more towards the learning of L2. However, if the students are proficient enough, we can leave thetranslation tool aside and again try to raise awareness on the communicative skills instead.

In conclusion, as Duff (1989) says, teachers and students now use translation to learn, rather than learning translation. Translation should be a tool to achieve other objectives and skills in a communicative methodology not an objective in itself because the main purpose today for learning the L2 forstudents is the international communication, interaction and understanding between learners or speakers of different nationalities.


Bibliography
1. DUFF, A. (1989): Translation: an interpretive approach. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press.

Some authors argue that translation is a valid tool for language instruction. Present arguments for and against the use of translation in your own...