El papel de la lengua materna en la enseñanza del español como lengua meta

Abstract

The use of the students´ mother tongue in teaching a new language seems to be a rather controversial issue if we review the history. Over the years there have been different theories of how foreign language teaching should be and what role the students´ mother tongue should have in it. In this qualitative study we observe two teachers who teach Spanish as a modern language in a high school in Gothenburg, Sweden to find out in what situations they use Swedish instead of the target language Spanish. Our study shows that the teachers use a variety of communication strategies in order to help the students understand the content in the new language, they also alternate between the students´ mother tongue and the target language in both a systematic and non-systematic way. We also present some existing theories related to the use of the students´ mother tongue in the foreign language classroom. The studies we present in this paper are not only about the Spanish language in the Swedish community, but also about the relationship between the mother tongue and the target language in general.