I think your point is a good one, but on most tests they don’t allow dictionaries anyway. So the most valuable skills you can teach a student are how to not freak out about not knowing a word, how to guess meaning from context, and how to arrive at answers using the information you do understand. Focusing parts of lessons on translation helps as well as students will start to realize they can’t translate sentences word by word.

Students get locked into intensive translation of English, and equate English with difficulty, with pain, and with sweaty dictionaries. It takes time, but they can be convinced that English can be fun, easy and needs only what they already know, plus one.

Electronic dictionaries are becoming popular here as well. These are also difficult for the students because of the sure number of results they often kick back, at least for Turkish. They often have 5 to 8 choices for a word.

I agree about the level of materials used. If necessary vocabulary isn’t pre-taught or if there are simply too many new words, students become frustrated and give up. Finding appropriate material and identifying potential problem areas for a particular class is one of the important jobs of a teacher I think.

I like your four point plan. I also am not against the use of occasional L1 in the classroom. I think you raise a valid point about time wasted. Sometimes it’s just not worth spending 5 minutes on getting students to understand a difficult word, especially if it’s holding up an activity. I’ll admit that I have translated a word for a student here or there just to speed things along. My ideas are not fixed on this issue quite yet.

On a similar note, often, one of my more important goals in class is to teach skills rather than a grammar point or vocabulary. For example, for receptive skills, I want the students to learn to understand words from context or understand the gist of something. For productive skills, I want them to be able to use the vocabulary they already have to describe something, or explain the word they want in English.

For these reasons, I’ll often refuse to translate during class, although they may approach me on a break. In real life situations like tests, business conferences, or bumping into a lost tourist, dictionaries are never at hand. I often purposefully don’t pre-teach words not important to understanding the main idea so that students will develop these skills. Honestly, I usually can’t translate a Turkish word without an attempted sentence anyway. The sheer number of possibilities is too many. I had too many problems in the past where I would translate a word and then the student would use it in his or her sentence, but they needed a completely different word.

Your point about LEARNING a word is important as well. I always tell my students to be patient. Even if you don’t fully understand a new word the first time, you’ll get it eventually. Google is a great resource for looking up multiple sentences to understand context better. Often in Turkish I’ll hear and new word and not understand it immediately, but, I hear it used a couple more times, and the meaning becomes clear.

But I am not against a little L1 in the classroom if it helps things along. If the student is trying to LEARN the word, translation alone isn’t really helpful for the reasons you’ve listed. But if they need to know it to get past a bump in an activity, why spend ten minutes trying to contort yourself into ‘English’ shapes when a quick Turkish word will do it?