The fourth reason why the local multilingual is the most
appropriate English language teacher for ASEAN is that s/he can
use the language of the students to help them learn English. That
is to say that a bi- or multilingual pedagogy can be applied in the
classroom. In the ASEAN context, adopting a bi- or multilingual
pedagogy can be more effective than adopting a strict monolingual pedagogy. It is hard to justify a monolingual pedagogy when the aim
of all language learning is, by definition, to create multilinguals.
It is therefore hard to justify denying students and teachers the
right to make use of their shared linguistic resources in language
learning. There are many ways in which the first language of the
students can be exploited in the learning of the second language
and these have been documented by several language teaching
professionals and scholars (e.g., Littlewood & Yu, 2009; Swain,
Kirkpatrick & Cummins, 2011). The fundamental principle to
be adhered to is that the first language must be used in such a
way as to help the student learn the second language.