Rehabilitation of the Mother Tongue in Teaching EFL to Adult Learners

AbstractAs the most widely-spread foreign language currently taught in the world, English has been compared and contrasted to almost all mother tongues in order to improve the outcome of the teaching/learning process. As a highly inflected language, Romanian differs from the almost analytical English in several respects that pose problems to the Romanian learner through their apparent simplicity and straightforwardness. The author has collected samples of current mistakes that intermediate Romanian learners make both in Romanian and in English: (i) they are not aware of certain subtleties in their mother tongue (like permission asking, granting obligation, necessity, probability or usage of verbal tenses etc); (ii) synonymy in Romanian; (iii) word-formation in both languages; (iv) they are confused regarding current ranks and titles in both cultures etc. In an experimental group of 60 intermediate students who study English as a major subject, the author made a two-sided experiment: she made sure that the students were familiar with the concept of modality in their mother tongue before passing on to teaching and explaining it in English. It was a successful idea as the students became aware of the concept of politeness and modality in Romanian and learned English modality more quickly and accurately