William’s mother sent me a message on WeChat after our first lesson together.
“I can roughly understand why his English now sounds like Chinglish,” she wrote. “It’s because he’s been away from the teaching approach of that international school for about two years, and he’s read very few English novels in the past two years. Besides, at his new school, the teachers often ask him to do translation exercises — translating Chinese into English and English into Chinese.”
Then she asked me something that stopped me.
“So in this kind of environment, what does he need to do on a daily basis to express himself in English directly from a concept, instead of first translating the concept into Chinese and then into English?”
She had diagnosed the problem herself. Precisely. In a single message.
William is a twelve-year-old student in China. When he was small, he learned English the way children learn any language — through cartoons, picture books, and immersion. From Grade 1 to Grade 4, he attended an international school where no Chinese was used in English classes at all. Vocabulary was explained in English. Stories were told in English. Even confusion was worked through in English. He watched every season of Peppa Pig. His brain built a direct channel between concept and the English word.
Then he switched schools.
At the new school, the method changed completely. English became a subject to be translated rather than a language to be inhabited. Teachers handed him Chinese sentences and asked him to produce English equivalents. The meaning came first in Chinese, and English arrived second — as a code to be cracked, not a language to be used.
Within two years, the direct channel had closed. Now, when William wants to say something in English, he thinks it in Chinese first, finds the Chinese words, and then searches for their English equivalents. His mother hears the result and calls it “Chinglish.” She’s right. It doesn’t sound like English because it isn’t being thought in English.
I have taught English across seven countries — Taiwan, China, Colombia, Turkey, England, the United States, and others. The students are different. The cultures are different. The classrooms look different. But the problem is almost always the same.
We teach students what English is. We do not teach them how to think in it.
In Colombia, I watched students memorize verb conjugation tables that they could recite perfectly and apply to nothing. In Turkey, I worked with university students who could pass a grammar test and fall apart in a conversation. In Taiwan, I met children who had studied English for six years and could not tell me what they had eaten for breakfast without stopping to translate each word in their heads.
The problem was rarely the language itself. More often, it was the method students were being asked to rely on.
Most EFL instruction treats language as content — something to store. Students are given words and rules and asked to remember them. But language is not content. It is a cognitive tool. And like any tool, it can only be learned properly by using it for the purpose it was designed for — making and communicating meaning.
When I replied to William’s mother, I told her this:
“Yes — concept first. And I have fifteen mental moves I’ll teach him to use for this — but concept must come first, because even if he doesn’t know a word he can make himself understood with a concept. I start with pictures, which feels backwards for his level. But this is how we make meaning first. It’s why, developmentally, we teach children through books with pictures — they see it, they understand from the picture, then they learn the words connected to it. I teach meaning first, words second.”
In our first lesson, I showed William a children’s picture book. I covered the words. I asked him to tell me what he saw. Not what the words said. What he saw.
He did it. Slowly at first. He pointed at images and reached for English descriptions without the safety net of a Chinese translation beneath them. The channel was still there — dormant, not gone. It just needed to be reopened.
This is not a new idea. It is, in fact, a very old one. Stephen Krashen’s input hypothesis argued decades ago that language is acquired through comprehensible meaning, not through the study of form. While some researchers support a limited role for translation in language learning, most acquisition research emphasizes the importance of meaning-focused input and direct communication. What William’s international school did instinctively — immersing him in meaning — is exactly what that research has consistently supported. What his new school replaced it with — translation as the primary method — is what that research has consistently questioned.
And yet translation-based instruction remains dominant across much of the world. Because it is easy to test. Because it produces visible, measurable output. Because a student who can translate a sentence has produced something a teacher can mark right or wrong.
A student who is learning to think in English produces something harder to measure and far more valuable.
William is twelve. But this pattern doesn’t end at childhood.
I work with a Vietnamese translator who has reached C2 level in English — the highest proficiency classification on the European framework. She translates professionally. Her grammar is precise. Her vocabulary is extensive. Ask her to find an error in a sentence, and she will find it immediately.
Recently I gave her two sentences and asked which was correct:
While they argued, the baby cried.
While they were arguing, the baby cried.
She said both were correct — and she was. Then I asked her to explain the difference in meaning.
She couldn’t.
She knew the rule. Past simple versus past continuous. She could apply it. What she had never been taught — what years of translation-based instruction had never required her to develop — was the ability to feel what the tenses actually mean. “Argued” looks back at the event from the outside, reporting it as completed fact. “Were arguing” puts you inside the moment, the argument still unfolding as the baby cried. One is a report. The other is a scene.
The grammar looks identical. The meaning is completely different.
She had built an extraordinarily sophisticated mechanism for converting between languages. What she had never built was the ability to construct meaning directly in English — to inhabit the language rather than translate into it. At C2 level. After years of study.
William is losing something he once had. She never had it to begin with. The method produced different problems in different learners, at different ages and in different countries. The root cause was identical.
What teachers can do differently?
The shift is not complicated, but it requires resisting a deep institutional habit.
Start with meaning, not form. Before introducing a word, introduce the concept it names. Use images, gestures, real objects, situations. Let students encounter the meaning before they encounter the label.
Remove the translation safety net gradually. Not all at once — that produces anxiety, not acquisition. But consistently. Create moments in class where the L1 is not available, not because it is forbidden, but because it is simply not needed. Ask students to describe what they see, not what they would say in their first language.
Treat confusion as diagnostic, not failure. When a student reaches for their first language mid-sentence, they are not necessarily failing. Often they are showing you exactly where their processing capacity in the target language ends. In Vygotskian terms, the switch frequently marks the boundary of the learner’s Zone of Proximal Development — the point where independent production in the target language breaks down and scaffolding is needed. That is useful information. It tells you where the concept has not yet been built in the target language, and where your teaching needs to go next.
Reward attempts at meaning over attempts at accuracy. A student who says “the man is going to the place where you buy food” has communicated something real. A student who says “the man goes to the supermarket” with perfect grammar but no meaning behind it has communicated nothing. The first student is learning to think in English. The second is learning to perform it.
William’s mother understood something that many teachers, curricula, and examination systems do not.
The goal is not to produce a student who can convert English into Chinese and back again. The goal is to produce a student who reaches directly for English when they have something to say — because the concept and the language have been built together, from the beginning, as one thing.
That is not just a better way to learn English. For many learners, it is the only way real acquisition begins.
