Experience, Knowledge about Language and Classroom Practice in Teaching Grammar
As a teacher I was always interested in the teaching of grammar and this fascination has remained me with in my work as a teacher educator and researcher into language teaching. However, when I initially (in the mid-1990s) wanted to start researching how teachers approach grammar teaching, I soon became aware that apart from a few descriptive studies (e.g. Peck, 1988) hardly anything had been written about teachers’ actual grammar teaching practices and about the experiential, psychological, and contextual factors behind these. Most existing research on grammar teaching had focused on the learner and on learning outcomes, with little attention to what teachers do and why. And such research, despite attempts to provide teachers with guidance as to how best to teach grammar, had not been conclusive in this respect. Paradoxically, then, we had accumulated an extensive volume of research on grammar teaching which contributed very little to an understanding of this instructional process as it is perceived by teachers.
In the light of contemporary constructivist thinking in teacher education, this lack of attention to teachers’ perspectives on their work was an obvious gap in our knowledge of this key area of language teaching. The goal of my research into grammar teaching has been to address this gap, and it has been satisfying to see that in recent years other researchers have also taken up this cause. Discussion of the knowledge base teachers draw on in teaching grammar is one issue in such research which has been awarded particular attention (e.g. Johnston & Goettsch, 2000). And although the term knowledge base refers to more than teachers’ knowledge about language (KAL), a concern for what teachers know and believe about language and how this impacts on their classroom practices has necessarily been a central theme (Andrews, 1999, 2001; Borg, 2001).
KAL is defined as the collection of attitudes towards and knowledge about English grammar which teachers possess. My aim here is to examine with reference to two teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) the nature of their KAL, influences on its development, and its impact on their grammar teaching practices.
