Learners’ perceptions of grammar-translation as consciousness raising

Abstract

Foreign language (L2) teaching methodologies of the twentieth century were dominated by the principle of monolingualism. Language teaching specialists and linguists of that time generally argued in their publications against using learners’ own languages in the classroom and described translation as a dull activity, which did not contribute anything to language learning. However, since the beginning of the twenty-first century, calls for a reassessment of translation have begun to appear. This article offers an argument for a reassessment of grammar-translation in language teaching based on learners’ perceptions of this activity. It reports a study in which 45 secondary school Polish learners of English were asked to evaluate two consciousness-raising activities they had performed: a grammar-translation task and a communicative language exchange. The results show that the learners considered translating sentences from Polish into English to be as useful and interesting as communicatively oriented consciousness raising.

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