Translation in Language Teaching: Examining its Potential Contribution to Teaching Grammar to EFL Students

This paper aims at examining the impact of using L1 in teaching grammar to a group of students learning English as a foreign language. The participants were 28 students (14 boys and 14 girls) with an age range between 10 to 18 years old with the mean of 14. They were divided into two groups, control and experimental. In the experimental group the students’ mother tongue was used for explaining the grammatical points while in the control group the grammatical points were presented by just using the English language. The classes were held for 20 sessions, 2 hours each. A validated test of grammar was used as the pretest and posttest to compare the achievement of both groups. Then, one way ANCOVA was used to compare the difference between the two groups. The findings indicated that the experimental group outperformed the control one which supported the judicious use of translation in teaching English language grammar. The findings were discussed and the implications were made.