First Language Use in Foreign Language Classroom Discourse

AbstractThe present paper draws on a subset of data from a larger project collected through COLT instrument (Communicative Orientation of Language Teaching) (Spada & Fröhlich, 1995) to investigate the nature of L1 (first language) use in student/teacher's interaction while engaged in pair/group work in real L2 (second language) classroom discourse. The study reports communicative features of pair/group work activity and the features of student/teacher interactions in which L1 appeared. It explores the use of L1 in scaffolding, private speech, and humor in the classroom in light of the reported communicative features