GPE Assigment Outline by Marie-Bernadette Rollins

Despite forming an integral part of many school policies, English-only rules have increasingly come under scrutiny by scholars and practitioners alike. While commonly promoted as facilitating and expediting L2 acquisition, recent research indicates that enforcing English-only policies in the ESL/EFL classroom constitutes a hindrance rather than a catalyst. Voices abound maintaining that EO policies are merely a post-colonial leftover designed to make the lives of monolingual English speakers easier, that such rules ignore the relevance of students’ L1 in SLA/FLA, and that alternative approaches are needed which take into account factors such as translanguaging processes, student motivation, confidence building, and student-teacher rapport.

Focusing on the private education sector in non-English speaking countries, I suggest a qualitative method conducting a case study in a private school in southern Europe to examine prescribed and lived policy in a private EFL school. My proposed method consists of semi-structured interviews combined with an analysis of the physical manifestations of the EO rule in the classroom (decorations, posters, signs, etc.). The interviewees include school management as well as teaching staff to gain insights into why EO policies are still established an upheld, to what extent they are implemented in the classroom, and why. The suggested method of analysis is a Discourse Analysis approach, in which interviewees’ statements are grouped by subject area and outlook and then examined and compared.

The goals are to a) describe the current state of research on the utility of EO policies and on L1 use in the private ESL/EFL classroom, b) to describe a case of EO policy in the private ESL/EFL sector, including its physical manifestations and practical implementation in the classroom, c) to highlight any discrepancies between the literature and school policy and classroom practice d) to examine beliefs about EO policies in school management and teaching staff and to compare outlooks on the matter, and e) to establish to what extent EO is still a viable policy and in how far it is obsolete or even counterproductive to learning.

English-only is a much-contended and highly topical research field, and my study seeks to give an insight into how far recent research findings influence policy making, as well as to illustrate potential discrepancies between management’s and teachers’ beliefs and differences between stipulated and lived policy.

The benefits purported by English-only advocates are weighed against the implications for classroom reality, and alternative methods of balancing students' L1 and L2 are explored. Options of L1 integration are highlighted, and an attempt at future recommendations is made in order to progress the field of TESOL.

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