ABSTRACT
The own-language activities refers to all classroom activities that involve the use of the learners own language, and translation refers to a subset of these. This chapter presents language learning and teaching as the promotion of plurilingualism, an approach which recognises that language is used in cultural contexts and that languages and cultures are not kept in strictly separated mental compartments. MLA Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages document argues that the desired outcome of language teaching in higher education should be educated speakers who have deep translingual and transcultural competence. Hall and Cook's survey found the learning use of own language to be very common: only 30 per cent of teachers reported that their students never used own-language for this purpose. Counter-arguments have been put forward by Malmkjr, Vermes, Cook, Hall and Cook, Laviosa and Ellis and Shintani, among many others.
