Prefeitura de União 2022 — Questão 32 · Língua Inglesa - Compreensão e Interpretação de Texto

Reasons to Use Translation in ELT

As anyone involved in ELT soon comes to realise, the profession is plagued by dogmatic opinions: you, the teacher, must do this, but you must not do that!! Yet, when probed, these diktats often turn out to be mere opinion – and not only opinion, but opinionated.

Among these insubstantial dogmas is one which has been ascendant and persistent for almost 150 years. This is the widespread belief that a language is best taught through the medium of that language itself, without reference to, or use of, the students‘ own languages. So strong is this belief that in many ELT contexts it is not just a recommendation but a law.

In this extreme monolingualist view, all of the many ways in which students‘ own language might well be profitably used – to explain, to comment, to establish relationships, to manage the classroom – are wrong. Yet there is one bilingual activity which has been singled out as particularly villainous. This is translation. Although it continues to be used in many contexts, in the mainstream ELT literature, at least until very recently, translation has simply been dismissed on all of the following charges:

• it impedes acquisition and fluency

• it creates a sense of false equivalence

• it is academic and impractical

• it is dull and boring and old-fashioned

• it is alien to real language use and communication

• it is a sign of teacher laziness

• and students hate it!

So widespread and accepted have these views been that in many quarters they have been asserted without evidence. So a problem for those, like me, who disagree with these charges, and regard translation as a valuable pedagogic strategy, is that it is actually very hard to find coherent arguments to counter. The conviction that translation is wrong has simply been taken for granted.

One of the oddest myths is that translation is an artificial academic exercise remote from real communication. Authentic communicative translation – even if it is only the occasional odd word or phrase – happens wherever there are speakers of more than one language with differential knowledge. Thus, there is translation in mixed-language families, or in families whose home language is not that of the majority outside. Granny and Grandad may need a younger generation to help them with filling in a form, and vice versa. And translation will be needed when relatives or friends come to stay – even if it‘s only of a restaurant menu. Schools with a multilingual catchment translate documents for parents and provide new arrivals with buddy interpreters. Any mixed language workforce is going to need some translation. In our globalised economies there is translated information all around us: food labels, airport announcement, subtitles. And all this before we even consider formal interpreting and translation; an activity on which international communication still depends. In short, translation is a widely practised and needed communicative activity.

In this context, the implicit assumption of monolingual instruction that students are learning English only to operate in monolingual environments is quite bizarre. A person who gets a job on the strength of their proficiency in English will very likely be expected to translate for colleagues whose level of English is lower. It is a necessary and authentic skill.

There is no evidence that translation impedes acquisition or fluency. This myth is unsubstantiated – though it is often linked to the discredited belief in early second language acquisition theory (SLA) that exposure to meaningful input is all that is needed, that conscious learning and explicit comparison of languages is ineffective, and that the learner‘s first language is irrelevant. Yet until very recently, there has been no SLA research on translation, and it doesn‘t figure at all in the SLA textbooks. So strangely, it seems that a field which prides itself on its scientific credentials, and the rigorous testing of hypotheses, did absolutely nothing to assess one of the most ancient, widespread and natural ways to approach a new language.

We live in a globalised multilingual world of multimedia communication across distances, cultures and languages in which people need English but do not necessarily want or need to abandon their existing identity and language. The old notion that one learns English to go to an English-speaking country and blend in unobtrusively with a monolingual community, speaking English without reference to one‘s own language, is simply both out of date and undesirable.

(Adapted from: https://www.cambridgeenglish.org/Images/525579-reasons-to-use-translation-in-elt.pdf. Accessed on April, 13^th, 2022)

According to the text, second language acquisition theory