The language used in second language teaching is always controversial. On the one hand, there are teachers and educators that support the exclusive use of native language by conducting EMI. In point of fact, EMI is conducted in order to improve communication, to exchange ideas, to create relations between countries, as it is also considered as a key to success, to open the doors for their students, or a way to meet personal challenge, and a way to improve the teachers both personally and professionally, EMI benefits the teachers and students alike. The government should propose EMI policies for promotion, globalization and financial survival, internationalizing the country or for other colonial reasons (Dearden, 2015). EMI adoption, instead, could be seen as controversial and sensitive, in a negative way that teachers and educators, as well as administrators and the government, might work against it for its academic or political reasons as follows:
to protect a national identity instead of bringing in a Western viewpoint;
to protect a native language or the freedom to study in a native language instead of a unified language. For example, EMI might endanger Indonesians' national identity, with the risk of the national unifying language, Bahasa Indonesia, becoming the language of the poor and English becoming the language of the elite classes;
to avoid linguistic imperialism. For example, the academic concern of EMI that has a negative result occurred in a Turkish University. That is, EMI reduced a student’s ability
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to understand concepts that leads to low levels of knowledge of the subjects studied. It takes too much time to teach the curriculum through EMI. That EMI causes feeling of alienation due to students' low level proficiency (Dearden, 2015).
The language used in second language teaching provoked more discussion in the following sections.
Exclusive use of native language. The adoption of EMI is known as the exclusive use
of a native language where second or foreign languages are taught through English. At the time there was the Great Reform of language teaching and most of the teaching methods did not allow the use of L1 due to the reasons that spoken language is more basic when compared to written language, grammar should not be directly translated, and language should be practiced as a whole according to Hawkins (as cited in Cook, 2001). Teaching methods like the Direct Method and the Audiolingual Method have restricted the L1 usage, whereas the Communicative Language Teaching and the Task-based approach have encouraged a maximizing use of L2. Weschler (1997) claimed that most teachers would like to avoid L1 usage for the reasons that they have diverse nationality students, or for the commercial expediency of the teachers, since they do not have the competence in using the students' native language to do with ideal pedagogy (as cited in Tai, 2003). There are researchers who support the exclusive native language teaching, and have come to the conclusion thatteaching a foreign language through target language results in a higher proficiency of the
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target language.
Turnbull is a French language teacher, but he is a non-native speaker who uses French to teach his students when analyzing a grammar point, debating controversy or even talking about social activities outside the classroom. In the beginning, his students did not accept learning the target language, however, as time went by, the students became used to it and thanked the teacher, as they considered exclusive usage of a foreign language in teaching motivated their learning and they felt the need to communicate in real-life circumstances (Turnbull, 2001). Turnbull has completed researches to see whether the varying amount of target language usage leads to different outcomes of the students' learning proficiency. The results showed that the higher the amount of target language used the higher the grades on the French proficiency and the achievement test. There is a positive relationship between the teacher’s language use and the test scores.
In contrast, the exceeding usage of the mother tongue may lead to failure in language learning as Polio and Duff (1994) pointed out, as problems will arise when teachers are not aware of their L1 use in the classroom. Polio and Duff (1994) researched the teachers’
language use in class and found the L1 usage varied from 10% to 100%, and they wanted to find out when the teachers used L1, for what functions, and to what extent. They finally concluded several reasons for avoiding L1 use, as well as the solutions for the areas that teachers found it difficult to use L2 as follows:
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1. When the students do not hear the word in L2, they first lose their opportunity to infer the meaning of the word from the context and to process this information in L2. Furthermore, when students know that the word in L2 is important, it will reinforce them to clarify the meaning, and then genuine communication will result as opposed to that of the use of L1 was simply to save time for difficult vocabulary.
2. Teachers perceive difficult grammatical rules which are hard to explain in the target language as it is usually written in L2 in the text book. Although the grammatical terms were confusing, they cover more useful materials through L2 and thereby give the
students the opportunity to process the communicative input to practice the new structures thoroughly in non-mechanical ways, and also to express and resolve comprehension problems in TL. Solutions to this problem is to start to teach grammatical terms at the beginning of the course, provide supplementary grammatical explanations, and leave time to clarify the grammatical point in L1.
3. Classroom management languages should be easy to teach and used frequently, therefore teachers do not need to use L1. These instructions represent the most authentic and natural communication in the classroom.
4. In the case of a comfortable environment being built through L1, the teacher could ask the students to explain the term in L1 thereby helping to develop the rapport between the teachers and students, but losing the chance to receive L2 input in a real-life situation.
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5. Communication breakdowns might occur when teachers ask a question in L2 and students cannot discern whether it is a display question or a real-life (referential) question. Two of the research participants (teachers) say it is part of their intentional strategies to use L1 to save class time and to reduce the frustration level of the students. The authors considered this as shortsighted. One solution to this is to tell the students that they don’t have to understand every single word to be able to know the meaning. If the teacher tries to paraphrase and to repeat in L2, the students have a better chance to learn the L2.
Polio and Duff (1994) inferred one possible reason that the teachers’ lack of ability to rephrase and modify their speech as their learning experiences were similar. They further suggested that by raising the conscious awareness of teachers L1 usage could help to
overcome the above problems, as they could video-tape themselves or ask for help since they know L2 should be used in a genuine communication. Students on the other hand, may not know the advantages of the exposure to the target language.
The outcomes of teachers’ instruction in L2 were beneficial to second language learning at that time. In Carroll’s research, the amount of time distributed to a foreign language, teacher’s proficiency in L2, and the amount of L2 used by teachers in the class, was a determining factor which influenced the students’ L2 proficiency. She claimed that the amount of time distributed to a foreign langue is the principle factor.
Furthermore, in Rossell’s (2004) research “Teaching English through English,” a
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structured immersion approach, which provides instruction almost entirely in English, but in a self-contained classroom consisting only of English language learners, outperformed bilingual instruction in California, Arizona, and Massachusetts. Rossell (2004) also claimed that the school actually never had a bilingual class that fit the theoretical model.