Feasibility of Using Translated Middle School Non-Native Instructor Utterances in L2 Lessons

Abstract

This study examines classroom dialog spoken by non-native instructors (NNIs) conducting English lessons in middle schools in Japan. The author video-recorded five English lessons conducted by five different non-native English instructors in two middle schools, which were attached to a national university of education. The video recordings contained utterances in both Japanese (L1) and English (L2). The author transcribed the utterances bilingually, and examined NNI utterances from two perspectives: L2/L1 ratios, and word frequencies. The ratio analysis found that the NNIs used L2 for between 5 to 55% of their utterances. The L2 utterances in the transcripts contained over 7,000 spoken tokens. The L1 utterances were manually translated into English (TL2) by the author. Lexical analysis of the L2 and TL2 tokens revealed a relatively higher rate of words in the primary 1,000-word band in the TL2 tokens than in the L2 tokens. When we consider the feasibility of NNIs using TL2 tokens to teach L2 in the classroom, the findings of this research appear encouraging with regards to NNIs conducting their lessons solely in L2.