| Summary: | By examining relevant academic literature this essay aims to investigate how and when teachers are supposed to use the target language in their language teaching. Many studies have shown that the target language is the obvious choice in language teaching, whereas other studies have shown that there are big advantages in using the first language instead. In this literature study the data was collected mainly from the databases LIBRIS, Linguistics Collection and ERIC (EBSCO), and thereafter the nine steps model of Polit and Beck (2017, pp. 88–109) was used for identifying relevant data. The findings in this study suggest that there are both pros and cons with using the first language in foreign language teaching. Some of the pros are that there is suggested to be easier to include all the students in the teaching, and that they develop a better understanding when hearing the instructions in their first language. At the same time however, some researchers mean that a mixture of the L1 and the target language can lead to confusion for both the teachers and the students. In this study there is also shown that many teachers hesitate to use the target language in their teaching due to lack of knowledge in their teaching area, a further explanation is that it goes faster and is seen as more effective to hold the teaching in the first language. Even though it is suggested that the first language makes the foreign language teaching easier the most researchers and teachers mean that it is immensely important to hear the target language being spoken, since the students otherwise will find it hard to be motivated to learn a language that they never hear. A method that is being positively spoken upon is Code-switching, which means that the speaker switches between the first language and the target language. This can be seen as a tool that can be used in many different ways in order to include as many students as possible in the language teaching.
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