The Use of L1: Improve Student’s Communication Confidence & Proficiency and Explain Difficult Concept
INTRODUCTION
Nowadays, English is known as an international language and I agree that almost all people use English when they meet people from other countries. Moreover, I find that there are more people who speak English as their second language (L2) than those who speak English as their first language (L1). Like most Indonesians, their L1 is Indonesian and English might be their L2 or foreign language (FL). As a result, Indonesians still need to learn English to help them facing globalization, so Indonesian students may have English as a subject in their schools.
However, I find that most Indonesian teachers still find a problem in teaching
According to Krashen’s input hypothesis theory (1985, as cited in Butzkamm, 2011), L2 learners should be fully exposed to the target language, or in other words, grammar and some other difficult concepts can be taught inductively or indirectly through the exposure. However, I would say that infants’ and learners’ conditions are different in some ways. The first one is that infants tend to excessively be exposed to their L1 even before birth (Butzkamm, 2011). From that we can infer that infants may have already accustomed or exposed to the language for 9 months before birth. Moreover, according to Clarke (2003, as cited in Butzkamm, 2011), three-year-old children are exposed to their L1 and use it for about seventy hours per week. Thus, Kuhl (2000, as cited in Butzkamm, 2011) says that they are engaged to the language so that they can detect language patterns and exploit the statistical properties of the input. However, in reality, learners are only exposed to L2 only for about 2-3 hours per week in the classroom. The exposure in the classroom will not be provided sufficiently for the learners in order to make the students understand some difficult language concepts. Some also say that, a great amount of exposure is needed in order to make the learners master the language, for example: communicating with others in their daily life using the target language. However, not everyone speaks in the target language; therefore the exposure is still limited. Swan (2005, as cited in Butzkamm, 2011) says that the exclusive use of language where the exposure and the time limit are poor is unsuitable because mere exposure to the L2 will not lead to