dc.description.abstract |
This descriptive study explored EFL teachers‟ actual classroom MT use. To this end, five EFL
teachers who were teaching at grades 9 to 12 were selected for the study based on purposive
sampling method; and nine students drawn from grades 9 to 12, selected by snow ball sampling
method, participated in the focus group discussion for triangulating the data .The data were
gathered through a 343 minutes long classroom observation and an 88 minutes long focus group
discussion. Ten English lessons were observed, and one focus group discussion was held. The
classroom observation and focus group discussion were all audio video recorded and
transcribed for analysis and interpretation. The data captured from the classroom observation
were quantitatively analyzed through frequency and percentages, and the data collected from the
focus group discussion were qualitatively analyzed. The findings showed that (1) EFL teachers
made use of a plethora of MT (30. 25% Amharic) and (69.23% English) in a way that may
deskill students by negatively affecting the learning of the FL (English). (2) The study uniquely
revealed that 0.52% of the total words uttered by the observed EFL teachers, were intra-word
code-mixed: strange phenomena of speech utterances where the EFL teachers added bound
Amharic (L1) morphemes to the free English (TL) morphemes. The data collected from the
students who participated in the focus group discussion pictured that EFL teachers frequently
utilized Amharic in their classes for various purposes with varying degree of use, and they
estimated that most EFL teachers‟ L1 use may fall within the range of 50% to 7o%.Furthermore,
the study indicated that EFL teachers‟ MT overuse might have emanated from the students‟ poor
knowledge of English and from the EFL teachers‟ low level of oral proficiency in the TL. Finally,
it is recommended that EFL teachers at Preparatory and General Secondary Schools should
make every effort to take their English to a fully competent speaker level, employ visual aids,
teach the FL through action and demonstration, use video lessons with attractive methodology,
and consider learners‟ proficiency and task difficulty to decide when to use the learners‟ L1 very
carefully and systematically to facilitate the teaching and learning of the TL. |
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