Whether L1 has a place in the ESL classroom is not a new question. In this study the researcher undertook to determine whether L1 use in pre-writing discussion among adult ESL learners in a university intensive English program had any impact on writing in terms of fluency, grammatical complexity and overall proficiency. Fluency was determined by a simple word count, grammatical complexity by T-unit analysis and overall proficiency by the mean of holistic scores given by a panel of three trained raters.
The subjects of the study were 35 students enrolled in high-intermediate and advanced classes in an intensive English program in a large university. Five times over ten weeks the subjects were given a short story to read outside of class. On the next class day they were asked to discuss a theme related to the reading in pre-assigned groups. Of the ten total discussions held during the quarter, half were conducted in homogeneous language groups in Arabic, Chinese, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean or Spanish and half in heterogeneous language groups in which the discussion was conducted in English. Following group discussion, the subjects were given a writing prompt also related to the theme of the reading and discussion, and asked to write about it in English.
When a total of 273 compositions were analyzed using a mixed effects ANOVA, no significant main effect was found between compositions written following discussion in L1 or in English. However, over the course of the 10 week study, it was found that the overall mean of four of the six independent variables were higher at the beginning of the quarter when discussion was held in L1 and that this pattern crossed in the middle of the term so that by the end the reverse was seen and the mean scores were higher following discussion in English.