Title: L1 teachers beliefs of grammar teaching in lower secondary schools compared with reasons from L2 and L3 teachers

Submitted by: Ida Gyde
Abstract: Field: Grammar has often been a contested part of L1 teaching (Hertzberg 2001, Myhill 2014 ), and in this regard it is possible for the study to contribute with knowledge of L1, L2 and L3 teachers reasons for grammar teaching. Our project is part of a large national study on grammar teaching in L1 (Danish), L2 (English) and L3 (German) languages in secondary school i Denmark (Gramma3, 2018-19). While the national study generally explores how grammar teaching is taking place and is conceived in the language classroom, this paper focuses on how teachers of languages explicetly justify grammar teaching. In this paper we focus primarily on Danish as first language supplemented with perspectives from English and German as foreign languages . We will discuss how different teacher beliefs are essential for ongoing considerations of developing practices of grammar teaching.

The research questions we focus on are : Which understandings do language teachers in L1, L2 and L3 in lower secondary schools give for teaching grammar, and how are their understandings of grammar and grammar teaching?

Theory and method: The national study is based on a social semiotic theory with a multilevel view upon grammar, and the research is a focused etnographic study containing observations in L1, L2 and L3 classes and interviews with the teachers involved. In the national study data from 7 schools are included. In this paper we focus on data from 9 interviews from 3 schools. We have used double blind coding.

Key findings: Our findings indicate a need for further development of grammar teaching. On the one hand, different tendencies appear within different languages. On the other hand, we find a connection between teachers understandings of grammar, their way of teaching grammar and their beliefs of grammar teaching.

References: Funke (2018) Herzberg (2001) Myhill (2018), Macken-Horarik, Sandiford, Love & Unsworth (2015)


keywords: grammar, teacher beliefs ,grammar teaching