In this second article our Head of Teacher Training, Vince Ferrer, reflects on the use of the mother tongue to promote noticing and how translation may be a classroom aid to scaffold learner language. With the emergence of research into the role of form-focused instruction, teacher-researchers have begun to acknowledge the mother tongue as a legitimate tool with the potential to facilitate learning mainly in accuracy-based tasks. This article reports on the findings from a comparative study of teachers', teacher educators' and students' perceptions carried out in Spain. The participants give their views on the desirability of, at times, providing learners with the English translation of what they are trying and finding difficult to say as a way of scaffolding or aiding their output. Results suggest that such scaffolding may be conducive to noticing on the part of the learners of the gap existing between their current inner grammar and the target grammar. Introduction The mother tongue in Second Language Acquisition has taken different swings depending on which theoretical framework was in vogue at any one particular time. While direct methods in the first half of the twentieth century saw no place whatsoever for the first language (L1) in the classroom, the grammar-translation method used the mother tongue so extensively and at the expense of target language (L2) practice that, even today, translation is in many instances regarded as an illegitimate practice because of its associations with this method. In the fifties and sixties Behaviourist and Contrastive Analysis proponents saw