How to Get Your Students to Stop Translating and Start Thinking in English

This research is aimed to describe how to get your students to stop translating and start thinking in English. Students usually translate things in their heads before presenting their ideas. We seldom have students who provide a natural sounding reply, spontaneously and automatically, without even blinking an eye. Our goal as teachers is to guide students towards increasingly thinking in English and drop the crutch of translation. But we all know this is precisely one of the hardest things to achieve. Why it’s so important for ESL students to stop translating and start thinking in English: 1. Consider their main goal. They want to learn to speak English, not become translators. 2. It’s counter-productive. The constant comparison of one language to another hinders naturally flowing speech. Experienced interpreters are real pros at this, but your students are not. 3. Some things are simply too hard to translate. This creates a situation where the student is desperately trying to remember how to say the one word they have in their minds in English, while they should be trying to recall a recent lesson instead. When you remove translation from your language learning process, you can learn to think in your target language from the beginning.

کلیدواژه ها:

language ، ESL student