The current study tackles English language teaching in middle schools in Turkey by discussing the inclusion and/or exclusion of the mother tongue through the eyes of teachers and students by presenting a descriptive review of the historical praxis of English teaching methods. So as to shed light on the research questions, 120 students were selected voluntarily from a state middle school and a questionnaire was applied. Additionaly, an interview was given to 4 teachers working at the same school in 2018-2019 education year. SPSS 20 was employed to examine the quantitative data and for the qualitative data, the coding method was utilized. Microsoft Excel 2010 was used in order to illustrate the results via pie and bar charts. The findings revealed that all students and teachers agree that they benefit from L1 based teaching-learning models mostly with skill and activity oriented preference. Both sides emphasized that the amount of English should be more than L1 but it is not feasible due to the examination system.