Essay About Second Language

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Recommended: The importance of learning foreign languages

English is an important language that is should be mastered by people around the world. It is used as a common language or lingua franca which is a language used for communication between people whose first language differ (Holmes, 1992). Increasingly, English is used for many printed information in our daily life. A great deal of the world’s scientific, commercial, economic, and technological information is written and published in English. That is the reason why students of elementary school up to university learn English as second language (ESL) or foreign language (EFL) nowadays.
In the context of ESL/EFL learning process, a class has a really important role. That is the main place where the learners are given many kind of target language …show more content…

Sometimes, students do not understand the target language which is used by the teacher. When it is happen, the teacher tries to negotiate the meaning of their utterance but sometimes it does not work. One more problem occurs when we know that every single student has a different linguistic competence. The implication of this problem is teachers have to be really careful in choosing TT that they use in the class. The problems above make the teachers have to explore their proficiency in explaining, asking, or giving instruction to the students.
Some difficulties in using TT make the teachers apt to use some language variations. One of the ways that frequently used is the use of code switching. Code-switching in a school classroom usually refers to bilingual or multilingual setting, and at its most general, entails switching by the teacher and/or learners between the language of learning and teaching (LOLT) and the learners’ main language. Code switching is a practice that enables learners to harness their main language as a learning resource. ( Mamokgethi Setati and Jill Adler in Liaqat Iqbal, …show more content…

Basically, the use of code switching in ESL/EFL classroom is still debatable. According to Liu Jingxia (2010), advocates of intralingual teaching strategy, such as Ellis (1984), Wong-Fillmore (1985), Chaudron (1988), Lightbown (2001), believe that teachers should aim at creating a pure foreign language environment since they are the sole linguistic models for the students and that code switching will result in negative transfer in SL/FL learning. On the contrary, researchers in support of crosslingual (code switching) teaching strategy including Tikunoff and Vazquez-Faria (1982), Levine (2003), Chen Liping (2004), etc., argue that L1 (the first language) can promote the learning of TL (target langauge) and L1 deserves a place in SL/FL classroom. Code switching is a good strategy of efficiency in SL/FL teaching.
Facing the conflicting opinions above, the writer try to explore the use of code switching in teaching English to get the clear empirical evidence about how it is used in eleventh grade students of SMA N 1

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