Copyedited by: VR 1.5 1.10 1.15 1.20 1.25 1.30 1.35 1.40 1.45 1.48 © The Author 2014. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. Optimizing new language use by employing young learners’ own language W.L. Quint Oga-Baldwin, and Yoshiyuki Nakata The use and appropriate amount of students’ own language (OL) in foreign language classes remains a subject of debate. While exclusive new language (NL) use may not necessarily always benefit all learners, especially young language learners (YLLs), overuse of the students’ OL may not provide the same range of communicative experiences as greater NL exposure. This article reports on measures by which teachers of elementary-age YLLs use the students’ OL in a systematic fashion to create an optimally rich NL environment. Successful elementary teachers of English as a foreign language in Japan and of Japanese as a foreign language in the United States were selected and observed, and classroom OL use practices enabling clear and engaging use of the NL were documented. Teachers made extensive use of signals for the use of the students’ OL within routines for classroom management to reduce student confusion. These findings are discussed with implications for teachers seeking to use the students’ OL to facilitate the use of the NL in class. One major ongoing debate in the literature on language teaching is the amount and function of the new language (NL) versus the own language (OL) 1 in class (Hall and Cook 2013). The value of using students’ OL through code-switching and other practices has been increasingly recognized (Hall and Cook 2012), the suggestion being that exclusive NL may not necessarily improve acquisition over mixed OL/ NL use (Macaro 2005). While many have argued that maximal use of the NL is desirable (and others further that OL use should consequently be prohibited) in order to provide a range of communication experiences—especially in EFL contexts (Turnbull 2001)—an optimal approach, where teachers judiciously use the OL to facilitate comprehension of the NL, may offer teachers greater flexibility to address classroom needs (Macaro 2009). Crucial to the optimal balance of OL and NL use is that teachers do not feel guilty using students’ OL for pedagogical purposes, as they might in a maximal situation (Macaro 2009). At the same time, the optimal position does not support using the OL a majority of class time, but to use it to support smooth and efficient engagement with the NL. To better define optimal OL use, AQ2 New and own language use in foreign language classes for young learners ELT Journal; doi:10.1093/elt/ccu010 Page 1 of 12