Despite protracted concerns about Norwegian students’ decline in grammar knowledge, the issue is poorly researched empirically. This article presents and the results from a grammar survey distributed to first-year student teachers (N=235). Our aim is to provide an empirical analysis of the level of Norwegian students’ grammar knowledge as they enter teacher education. We seek to answer the following research questions: RQ1: What characterizes the knowledge of grammar of Norwegian student teachers as they enter teacher education? RQ2: Are there grammatical topics and structures that they master more or less? If so, what characterizes these topics?   The results show that the grammar knowledge of student teachers, is rather poor. The students know the word classes verb, noun, adjective and pronoun, as well as the SC subject. Their knowledge is founded on semantics, while the structural features of language seem to be a blind spot. The study contributes to the international research on Knowledge of Language (KaL) from a Norwegian perspective. Due to the two written standards of Norwegian, our study will be the first to report student teachers’ grammar knowledge from such a context.

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This paper explores the conceptions of grammar of first-year teacher students (N = 235) in Norway. A conventional content analysis is used to analyse the answers from the first part of a survey exploring the teacher students’ views of grammar through the following questions: Q1. How would you define the term grammar? Q2. Do you think grammar is an important part of Norwegian as a school subject? Q3. Do you feel confident in grammar? The second part of the survey is a grammar knowledge test. The results show that most students define grammar as writing correctly. Many answers also refer to language structure. Among the less frequent definitions are: theoretical knowledge of language structure, precise communication, text, and constituent analysis. Nearly all students report that they consider grammar important. Moreover, most consider their own grammar competence to be relatively good. However, there is a discrepancy between this self-evaluation and the results from the knowledge test, which are quite poor. Our study contributes to the body of research on teacher students’ conception of grammar, which, in a Norwegian context, has been unexplored. We discuss our findings in the light of national and international literature, and we propose plausible contributing factors. We also reflect upon possible consequences for teacher education.