Hi Fatima and Nick,

Nick, all of what you've written is true, but Fatima didn't say she wanted to prevent learners from using their mother tongue; she said she wanted to prevent them from 'over-using' their mother tongue. While I think some use of the mother tongue is  justified, I believe that speaking tasks for fluency practice should be done in  English.

My advice is: firstly, explain to the students that they have limited opportunities to use English, so they need to use it as much as possible in class. Then be a model yourself: use English for greetings, instructions, and explanations.

Other ideas:

Nominate 'language monitors' in your class; they have to keep everyone in their group speaking English.

Put a big English-Only Zone poster on your wall and point to it when the students start talking too much in their language. 

Make a game of it, e.g., every time the students speak their language at the wrong moment they lose a point (they start with 20 points at the beginning of the lesson). Invent some kind of forfeit or prize for the teacher!

Be creative: one teacher of kids introduced a glove puppet to class, which "only understands English", so the students had no choice! Other teachers get students to assign themselves a classroom alter-ego (a name and character that belongs to a native speaker). They 'become' this person on walking into the classroom.

Good luck with your teaching.

JJ

My good friend JJ rightly rebukes me for the lack of clarity in my posting. There is clearly a place for the mother tongue as an aid to learning but the mother tongue should not be used during English language production or communication activities. I like JJ's suggestions for English language monitors and making a game with forfeits. For lower level learners, speaking English is  always an artificial "performance". The idea of an English speaking alter-ego is particularly useful.

As JJ says, the teacher should always use English for all social and classroom management tasks in the classroom. Unlike the glove puppet, the teacher should not pretend to be totally ignorant of the learners' mother tongue. Particularly when teaching young learners, the mother tongue should be available as a "safety net", but a safety net which is very rarely used.

When learning rock climbing, learners are always attached to a safety line which will save them if they lose their footing. Only very experienced and brave rock climbers attempt to "free climb" without a safety line. The safety line does not prevent trainee rock climbers from learning the skills of the sport. In the same way, the safety net of the mother tongue, should not prevent students from developing their mastery of English..

When direct-method English only methodology was introduced there was much talk of "full immersion" suggesting that if non-swimmers are thrown into water, they would discover their own survival strategies. Today our children learn to swim using buoyancy aids. As they become more competent, they cast off the buoyancy aids as being childish. Water wings are the aquatic equivalent of the bilingual phrasebook -- useful in the early stages of learning but devices which a more competent learner is too embarrassed to be seen wearing.

We need to be less dogmatic in our attitudes to the mother tongue. We need to be willing to investigate the role of the mother tongue in learning a foreign language.

I hope you enjoy teaching your students to swim in English!

Nick

Well, to be honest they really have sweet teeth! there's a good confectionary near our institute. every day i pass there they say what's new today mehdi? how many chocolate for today?

but all jokes aside, my students really enjoy the class. some times we forget about time and leave the class 15 or 30 minutes late!