12
Mother Language
by tipu ·
It is no easy task, either to teach or to help a teacher to teach foreign language. But for the teacher, there is a special difficulty that is not commonly considered: it is the difficulty of overcoming the barrier of the pupil’s mother tongue. For the mother tongue acts as a block in all the learner’s language reactions, and impedes the learning of the language because it is so firmly seated as the first language. Indeed, the mother tongue is so much a part of our mental lives and of our unreflecting consciousness as well as our automatic responses to experience, that usually we are not aware of language when we speak or listen or write. but in using a foreign language we cannot at first avoid being aware of language symbols and of attending to words, sentence patterns and grammatical forms, instead of meaning.
