Students’ Own Language Use in the Foreign Language Classroom in Middle School

Much of the literature concerning students’ own language use during foreign language classes has either focused on some general ideas regarding this topic, or had in the centre of its research teachers. It led to the situation where the mother tongue usage in class is discussed without taking into consideration main participants of the process – students. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore students’ attitude towards their mother tongue usage in a foreign language classroom. To reach the goal, the author relied on the quantitative approach: a survey was distributed among middle school students that are in the focus of the research. The results demonstrated that students generally support their mother tongue usage, even though almost half of respondents voted for its reduction, as sometimes teachers tend to overuse it. The findings of this study are expected to contribute to deeper understanding of students’ own language use at class, and to raise more questions for future research.