In this second decade of the 21st century, we have come to an interesting point in documenting and evaluating the place of L1 in teaching L2.

Until recently, received ELT wisdom has seen the default EL classroom as a monolingual one. This position has informed all dimensions of ELT: International textbooks and materials, such as the ‘Passages’ series examined in this study; teacher training, according to my current experience and as confirmed in the literature (e.g. He & Lin, 2013); and in the monolingual focus and indeed bias of the SLA research field. Accordingly naturalised discourses of ELT have emerged which favour monolingual, native-speaking teachers of English at the expense of bilingual, non-native speaking teachers of English. Yet, the great majority of EL teachers in the world today are not monolingual but bilingual or multilingual, and share a first language and culture with their students.

In recent years, a shift of theoretical position in regard to L1 use has clearly occurred. As noted earlier, Ellis and Shintani (2014: 235) assert that ‘the pendulum has swung firmly in [L1’s] favour’. Moreover, a study of nearly 3000 teachers in over 100 countries confirms that bilingual practices are a staple of L2 teaching (Hall & G. Cook, 2013). Yet, as also noted earlier, ‘zero-tolerance [of L1] policy is still the norm in many Asian educational systems’ (Barnard & McLellan, 2014a: 8). This dissonance between what teachers are doing and what they are told they should be doing is clearly problematic, and has led to numerous calls for analysis of actual classroom practice.

It is to such calls that this research has responded. As such, it represents, to my knowledge, only the second book-length case study set in an Asian EFL context (following that of Song and Andrews in China, 2009). Moreover, other studies, while of great value, have been mostly small-scale and structurally-based, seeking to identify the forms and functions of L1/L2 use in classrooms. This book too has employed a structural approach in its exploration of bilingual pedagogy.