Norwegian teacher students’ conceptions of grammar

Abstract

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.

Isländska lärares och elevers attityder till grammatik

“…There, the main focus is on making students knowledgeable about their mother tongue, improving their language use and increasing their interest in the language, together with an emphasis on equipping students with the analytical concepts and tools necessary for metalinguistic instruction and discussions. Consequently, our study contributes to the ongoing research on the application of and attitudes towards grammar in European and Nordic school contexts (see Myhill et al, 2012;Nygård & Brøseth, 2021;and references there).…”

Assessing knowledge of English verb placement and subject-verb agreement among multilingual students in grades 5–7 in Norway

“…Teachers themselves may also lack explicit knowledge of grammar. Nygård and Brøseth (2021) found that teacher students training to teach Norwegian believe grammar is important, and consider their own competence of grammar to be good, but their performance on a grammatical knowledge test showed their performance was poorer than the students' self-reported knowledge, particularly for metalanguage, language analysis, and subject knowledge. While I know of no comparable studies of English teachers in Norway, there is possibly some overlap given that teachers usually teach multiple subjects at the primary and lower secondary school level.…”

ConBaT+: Possibilities and challenges in preparing student teachers in English for plurilingual education

“…As the use of only the dominant language, either Norwegian or English, has been emphasized in language classrooms, it appears that most Norwegian students have little experiences in seeing language as an object of study for cross-linguistic analyses. It has also been reported that student teachers in Norway do not possess sufficient theoretical knowledge of language structure in English even though they perceive grammar to be important in language teaching (Nygård & Brøseth, 2021).…”