When Students Think About L1 First: What Teachers Often Misunderstand About Language Learning

William’s mother sent me a message on WeChat after our first lesson together.

“I understand why his English now sounds like Chinglish,” he wrote. “It is because he has been absent from the teaching method of that international school for about two years, and in the last two years he has read very few novels in English.” Besides, at his new school, teachers often ask him to do translation exercises — translating Chinese to English and English to Chinese.”

Then he asked me something that stopped me.

“So in this kind of environment, what does he need to do every day to express himself in English directly from the mind, rather than translating the mind into Chinese and then translating it into English?”

He had found himself in trouble. Of course. In one message.

William is a twelve-year-old student in China. When he was young, he learned English the way children learn any language – through cartoons, picture books, and immersion. From Grade 1 to Grade 4, he attended an international school where no Chinese was used in English classes. Vocabulary was explained in English. Stories were told in English. Even the confusion is done in English. You have watched all the seasons of Peppa Pig. His mind creates a direct line between the concept and the English word.

Then he changed schools.

In the new school, the approach changed completely. English became a subject to be translated instead of a language lived by people. The teachers gave him Chinese sentences and asked him to produce the English equivalent. The explanation came first in Chinese, and English came second – like a code to be cracked, not a language to be used.

Within two years, the direct channel had been closed. Now, when William wants to say something in English, he thinks in Chinese first, finds Chinese words, and then searches for similar words in English. His mother felt the effect and called it “Chinglish.” You are right. It does not sound like English because it is not thought in English.

I have taught English in seven countries – Taiwan, China, Colombia, Turkey, England, United States, and others. Students are not the same. Different cultures. Classes look different. But the problem is almost always the same.

We teach students what English is. We don’t teach them how to think about it.

In Colombia, I watched students memorize verb conjugation tables that they could not say well and use at all. In Turkey, I worked with university students who could pass a grammar test and fail an interview. In Taiwan, I met children who had studied English for six years and couldn’t tell me what they had for breakfast without stopping to translate each word in their heads.

The problem was rarely the language itself. Generally, it was the method that students were asked to rely on.

Most EFL instruction treats language as content — something to be memorized. Students are given words and rules and asked to remember them. But the language is not satisfied. It is a mental tool. And like any tool, it can only be learned correctly by using it for the purpose it was designed for – to make and convey meaning.

When I answered William’s mother, I told her this:

“Yes – the mind first. And I have fifteen mental steps that I will teach him to use for this – but the mind must come first, because even if he doesn’t know the word he can make himself understood by the mind. I start with pictures, which he feels are behind his level. But this is how we make meaning first. That is why, in development, we teach children with books with pictures – they see the picture, then understand it first, understand the words. second.”

In our first lesson, I showed William a children’s picture book. I closed the words. I asked him to tell me what he saw. Not what the words say. What he saw.

He did it. Slowly at first. He pointed to the pictures and accessed the English descriptions without the safety net of the Chinese translation beneath them. The station was still there – silent, not moving. It needed to be reopened.

This is not a new concept. Actually, it is very old. Stephen Krashen’s hypothesis showed decades ago that language is acquired through intelligible meaning, not through the study of form. Although some researchers support the limited role of translation in language learning, most acquisition studies emphasize the importance of mind-centered input and direct communication. What William’s international school does by default – grounding him in meaning – is exactly what that research has consistently supported. What his new school has replaced – translation as the main method – is what that research has always questioned.

And yet translation-based instruction remains dominant throughout the world. Because it’s easy to test. Because it produces a visible, measurable result. Because a student who knows how to translate a sentence has produced something that the teacher can mark as right or wrong.

A student who learns to think in English produces something that is difficult to measure and very important.

William is twelve years old. But this pattern does not end in childhood.

I work with a Vietnamese translator who has reached the C2 level in English — the highest technical classification in the European framework. He translates professionally. His grammar is precise. His vocabulary is wide. Ask him to find an error in a sentence, and he will find it quickly.

Recently I gave him two sentences and asked him which was correct:

While they were arguing, the child cried.

While they were arguing, the child cried.

He said they were both right – and he was right. I then asked him to explain the difference in meaning.

He couldn’t.

He knew the law. The simple past versus the simple continuous. He can use it. What he had never taught – what years of translation-based teaching had never required him to develop – was the ability to sense what the times really meant. “Disproved” looks back on the event from the outside, reporting it as absolute truth. “We were arguing” you put it in the middle, the argument continues as the child cries. Another report. Another scene.

The grammar looks the same. The meaning is completely different.

He developed an incredibly complex method of changing languages. What he had never developed was the ability to construct meaning directly in English — to live in the language rather than translate into it. At the C2 level. After years of study.

William loses something he once had. He never had it in the first place. This approach has produced different problems for different students, at different ages and in different countries. Its origin was the same.

Which teachers would do differently?

Change is not complicated, but it requires resistance to deep institutional practice.

Start with meaning, not form. Before introducing a word, introduce the idea it creates. Use pictures, gestures, real objects, shapes. Let students encounter the definition before they encounter the label.

Remove the translation safety net little by little. Not all at once – that creates anxiety, not gain. But consistently. Create times in the classroom when L1 is not available, not because it is forbidden, but because it is not needed. Ask students to describe what they see, not what they can say in their first language.

Treat confusion as a diagnosis, not a failure. When a student reaches their first language in the middle of a sentence, it does not mean they are failing. They often show you where their ability to process the target language ends. In Vygotskian terms, change often marks the boundary of a learner’s Zone of Proximal Development — the place where independent production of the target language breaks down and scaffolding is needed. That is useful information. It tells you where the concept has not yet been developed in the target language, and where your teaching needs to continue.

Reward efforts to find meaning over efforts to be accurate. The reader who said “the man goes to the grocery store” said something real. The student who says “the man goes to the store” has a complete knowledge of the language but has not expressed anything. The first student learns to think in English. The second is to learn how to do it.

William’s mother had an understanding of many teachers, lesson plans and test systems.

The goal is not to produce a student who can convert English to Chinese and back again. The goal is to produce a reader who has direct access to English if he has something to say — because thought and language are built together, from the beginning, as one.

That’s just not the best way to learn English. For many students, it is the only way to get real first.