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In:Early Language Education in Instructed Contexts: Current issues and empirical insights into teaching and learning languages in primary school
Edited by Stefanie Frisch and Karen Glaser
[Language Learning & Language Teaching 62] 2025
► pp. 64–91

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Chapter 4
On teachers’ use of the L1 in primary English classrooms in Germany

 | University of Flensburg
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Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

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Published online: 22 May 2025
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https://doi.org/10.1075/lllt.62.04lim
Abstract
This study deals with how teachers make use of their L1 in primary English classrooms in Germany. The database for the analysis consists of 24 lesson transcripts from grades 3 and 4 which were taken from the Primary English Classroom Corpus (PECC) (Limberg, 2019). The analysis first focuses on the frequency of teachers’ L1 use in the data corpus and then takes a qualitative, CA-oriented perspective on four selected cases to describe the organisation of codeswitching and the consequences which the L1 use potentially has for the ongoing interaction with the learners. Conclusions are drawn on the importance of discussing language use and classroom discourse in primary English teacher education.
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Literature review
  • 3.Research aims and methodology
    • 3.1Research aims
    • 3.2Database
    • 3.3Data analysis
  • 4.Results
    • 4.1RQ1: Frequency of L1 use
    • 4.2RQ2: Differences in L1 use
    • 4.3RQ3: Qualitative Analysis of L1 use
      • 4.3.1Micro L1 use
      • 4.3.2Macro L1 use
  • 5.Discussion
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Note
  • References
References (61)
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