Mother tongue mirroring is a technique for teaching languages

Language education

Language education is the teaching and learning of a foreign or second language. Language education is a branch of applied linguistics.- Need for language education :...

. It is the adaptation of the time-honoured practice of literal translation

Literal translation

Literal translation, or direct translation, is the rendering of text from one language to another "word-for-word" rather than conveying the sense of the original...

, or word-for word translation for pedagogical purposes. The aim is to make foreign constructions salient and transparent to learners and, in many cases, spare them the technical jargon of grammatical analysis. It differs from literal translation

Literal translation

Literal translation, or direct translation, is the rendering of text from one language to another "word-for-word" rather than conveying the sense of the original...

 and interlinear text as used in the past, since it takes the progress learners have made into account and only focuses upon one specific structure at a time. As a didactic device, it can only be used to the extent that it remains intelligible to the learner, unless it is combined with a normal idiomatic translation.

Compound words

Compounds can be broken down into their component parts to help learners understand their logic. For example, in German:

Target vocabulary	Idiomatic translation	Literal translation
Handschuh	glove	hand shoe
Zahnarzt	dentist	tooth doctor
Faustregel	rule of thumb	fist rule
Lehnwort	loanword

So ‘loanword’ is originally an exact copy of the German compound, or calque

Calque

In linguistics, a calque or loan translation is a word or phrase borrowed from another language by literal, word-for-word or root-for-root translation.-Calque:...

. The term ‘mother tongue mirroring’ can itself be regarded as a calque from German, because it is originally a translation of ‘muttersprachliche Spiegelung’.

Idioms and proverbs

Over and above knowing what idioms actually mean in order to use them properly, learners want to know how they come to mean what they mean. In another example from German:

Target vocabulary	Idiomatic translation	Literal translation
Kopf und Kragen riskieren	stick one’s neck out	risk head and collar
etwas auf eigene Faust tun	act on one’s own authority	do something on one’s own fist
die Hände in den Schoß legen	rest on one’s oars	put the hands in the lap

Pragmatic formulas

In French:

Target vocabulary	Idiomatic translation	Literal translation
s’il vous plaît	please	if it to-you pleases

In Turkish:

Target vocabulary	Idiomatic translation	Literal translation
teşekkür ederim	thank you	thanks make-I

Collocations

In German:

Target vocabulary	Idiomatic translation	Literal translation
Ein starker Raucher	a heavy smoker	a strong smoker
eine Drohung wahrmachen	fulfil a threat	make a threat true
eine Familie gründen	start a family	ground a family

Syntax

Mother tongue mirroring is most helpful for discovering the hidden anatomy of foreign grammars, especially of non-related languages. In Mandarin:

Target vocabulary	Idiomatic translation	Literal translation
hǎo bù hǎo? (好不好?)	Is it good?	Good, not good?
nán bù nán? (难不难?)	Is it difficult?	Difficult, not difficult?

Untranslatable particles such as Mandarin le, meaning 'temporary change of state or situation', are simply inserted in the mirrored version:

Target vocabulary	Idiomatic translation	Literal translation
wǒ è le.	I‘m hungry.	I hungry le.
wǒ bǎo le.	I'm full(up).	I full le.

For more Chinese constructions mirrored in English see Wu.

Generative principle

Making a structure transparent is not an aim in itself but serves the ultimate aim of enabling the learner, in Wilhelm von Humboldt’s

Wilhelm von Humboldt

Friedrich Wilhelm Christian Karl Ferdinand Freiherr von Humboldt was a German philosopher, government functionary, diplomat, and founder of Humboldt Universität. He is especially remembered as a linguist who made important contributions to the philosophy of language and to the theory and practice...

 words, to make infinite use of finite means (“von endlichen Mitteln unendlichen Gebrauch machen”). In foreign language teaching, this basic human capacity is captured by the generative principle

Generative principle

In foreign language teaching, the generative principle reflects the human capacity to generate an infinite number of phrases and sentences from a finite grammatical or linguistic competence...

.

In “The awful German language” Mark Twain

Mark Twain

Samuel Langhorne Clemens , better known by his pen name Mark Twain, was an American author and humorist...

 humorously explained the difficulties of German syntax and morphology by mirroring long sentences in English. Although the main intent is satirical rather than didactic, Twain provides interesting insights into the workings of the German language.

Mirroring is amply used in commercial phrasebooks and computer courses and is a common device in scientific grammars of remote languages, but has been ignored by modern coursebook authors, along with other bilingual techniques such as the sandwich technique

Sandwich technique

In foreign language teaching, the sandwich technique is the oral insertion of an idiomatic translation in the mother tongue between an unknown phrase in the learned language and its repetition, in order to convey meaning as rapidly and completely as possible...

, presumably because of the mother tongue taboo, still prevailing in mainstream language teaching methodology.
According to Butzkamm & Caldwell , mother tongue mirroring should be re-instated as a central teaching technique, especially when learners are not ready for grammatical analysis. It is analysis by analogy. It is foreign grammar in native words.

See also

• Chinese-ordered English
  Chinese-Ordered English
  Chinese-ordered English is the use of English words to represent the meaning of Chinese phrases and sentences that maintains the word order of the original Chinese....
  
  
• English-ordered Chinese
  English-Ordered Chinese
  English-ordered Chinese is the use of Chinese words to represent the meaning of English phrases and sentences that maintains the order of the original English.-As a Learning Tool:...
  
  
• English-ordered Japanese
  English-Ordered Japanese
  English-ordered Japanese is Japanese that is written in English word order for the purpose of teaching English grammar to Japanese people...
  
  
• Kanbun
  Kanbun
  The Japanese word originally meant "Classical Chinese writings, Chinese classic texts, Classical Chinese literature". This evolved into a Japanese method of reading annotated Classical Chinese in translation . Much Japanese literature was written in literary Chinese using this annotated style...