Wolfgang Butzkamm

Maxim 8. It is not possible to avoid interference, but it can be greatly reduced.

For a century now, teachers have been served up trivial and banal arguments that nobody would deny: “One cannot learn a foreign language if one constantly speaks another language”; likewise: “the mother tongue causes interference errors at all levels of language”. Compare the meanings of figure with la figure and die Figur; *”Heute jeder hat einen Computer”, modelled on English word order, or *”We make sometimes trips”, modelled on German word-order. It looks as if the native language constantly gets in the way, walks in uninvited and tempts us into unwanted errors. However, the perception that the mother tongue apparently traps and tricks us into making mistakes, prevents us from realizing a deeper truth: interference is nothing other than knowledge or skills that we do not yet possess. MT constructions act as a default, stepping in when our memory fails, offers nothing else and lets us down. What can the learner do other than use what he already knows to make up for what he does not know? “The problem of ‘interference’ viewed thus reduces to the problem of ignorance.” (Newmark & Reibel, 1968: 160).

"Can I write a double point?" (= use a colon) a pupil asks. He does not know the English equivalent for "Doppelpunkt" yet and is helping himself in the most natural way. The solution to such interference problems lies in versatile and autonomous use of appropriate expressions in life-like situations – after the problem has been identified and rectified. Such lexical transfers are common in the speech of developing bilinguals: Thomas: I'm just schraubing this on. (Pause) What do you say for that, Mum? - Mother: Screwing. - Thomas: I'm just screwing this on - see? (Saunders, 1988: 182).

Even the best teaching can never fully prevent us from disruptive interferences. Uncritical carry-overs from the MT can be best phased out, not by avoiding the MT in fear, but by using it well. Again, some faux amis (of the lexical and grammatical sort) stay unrecognised if they are not contrasted against the mother tongue. Instead of skirting around them, we meet them head on. In the Nijverdal experiment (Meijer, 1974), it was possible to reject the hypothesis that bilingual techniques as used by Dodson lead to more interference errors related to the mother tongue than are found in strictly monolingual lessons.

Maxim 9. Paradoxically, the counter-productive, haphazard use of the mother tongue may be an unwanted side-effect of the doctrine of monolingualism.

The native language must be used systematically, selectively and in judicious doses, and never in the inconsiderate, lazy and time-consuming way it is so often employed today by disaffected teachers. It is shocking how often exactly what was supposed to be avoided actually does take place, namely that the prevailing classroom language is in fact the mother tongue. Less skilled and less proficient teachers can have problems maintaining an officially monolingual teaching paradigm. Rather than being used, therefore, the mother tongue is misused. Teachers simply succumb to the ease of conducting the class in the MT.

Conversely, pupils are well known to protest that they cannot keep up in FL-only lessons because the level of conversation is over their heads. The results of a poll of some 1300 Year 9 pupils of both sexes across four English secondary schools revealed the following:

One of the biggest frustrations for underperforming boys was not understanding the point of a lesson and what the teacher was trying to get them to do. This was particularly so when the lesson was solely or mainly conducted in the foreign language. “When a lesson is all in the target language, those underperforming hadn’t a clue what was going on. They were vociferous about that. The feeling of being lost in language lessons was so clear. It’s sad really. I had never thought of them not quite knowing what is going on. They may vaguely know, but not why they are doing it.” (Thornton, 1999: 11)
English pupils have a particularly hard life. Many do not have textbooks with bilingual vocabulary and grammar sections in the appendix. Pent-up frustration explodes: teacher and pupils alike may end up talking in their mother tongue alone.⁴


Maxim 10. All newly-acquired FL items have to sink roots in our minds which are eventually deep enough for the items to function independently of the MT.

This is only possible, however, through the sensible and timely use of the foreign language, and not by avoiding the MT on principle – compare the change in Britain to decimal coinage when prices in the old currency continued to be displayed until the value of the new currency had become meaningful to most people. Similarly, with growing proficiency in the foreign language, the use of the MT becomes largely redundant and the FL will stand on its own two feet. This natural decline in aid from the mother tongue can be explained in terms of the weakening of a temporary internal response in the wake of an overarching association: it simply gets practised away. “The indirect bond [with the MT] is short-circuited out by practice just as memorial dodges for remembering people’s names are eliminated once the name is established” (West, 1962: 48). Brown (1972) called it “cognitive pruning”. There seems to be a neurological principle of economy at work (Butzkamm 1989 / 2002a: 36ff.). “Thinking” in the FL is not an all-or-nothing affair. It begins in the very first lesson of a FL when pupils learn to respond automatically to and with formulas such as Good morning, thank you, yes or no. Both kinds of behaviour occur side by side: “I do make mental translations and these give me a feeling of security, yet I do find myself thinking directly in the language when I read, or go over an assignment, or create utterances in class” (Rivers, 1979: 71).