Elsevier

Teaching and Teacher Education

Volume 36, November 2013, Pages 77-91
Teaching and Teacher Education

Grammar matters: How teachers' grammatical knowledge impacts on the teaching of writing

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2013.07.005Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Teachers' grammatical knowledge influences what students learn about writing.

  • Limitations in teachers' grammatical content knowledge can generate student misconceptions.

  • Teachers' ‘applied’ knowledge is more significant than declarative knowledge.

Abstract

Teaching grammar has been mandated in statutory curriculum documents in England since 1988. Yet despite this, research evidence continues to suggest that metalinguistic knowledge is an area of challenge for many teachers. Drawing on data from a larger study, this paper considers the role of teachers' grammatical knowledge, both content and pedagogical content knowledge, in mediating learning about writing in the classroom. It also illustrates how students' learning about writing is influenced by teachers’ metalinguistic knowledge. The study highlights that grammatical pedagogical content knowledge is more significant than grammatical content knowledge in supporting meaningful teaching and learning about writing.

Section snippets

Introduction: framing the problem

The importance of subject knowledge in teachers' professional development has been the focus for a substantive body of research in teacher education. Shulman's (1987) seminal work on theorising subject knowledge is important in its endeavour to categorise the nature of knowledge required in the complex act of teaching. He distinguishes between subject content knowledge (knowledge of an academic domain), pedagogical content knowledge (knowledge of how to teach that academic domain) and

Theories of metalinguistic knowledge

Defining metalinguistic knowledge is not as straightforward as it might initially appear. The term is used differently in psychology and linguistics (Gombert, 1992: 13; Myhill, 2011: 249): in general, psychologists are interested in the thinking processes which accompany text production, whereas linguists are more concerned with language as an artefact. A further ambivalence concerns the place of metalanguage, especially grammatical terminology, within metalinguistic knowledge and the tendency

The larger study

The data for this article draws on a subset of data from a larger Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) funded study, involving a research team of two investigators, one research fellow, and one doctoral studentship linked to the study. The study is reported in full in Myhill, Jones, Lines and Watson (2012) and the statistical results are reported more fully in Jones, Myhill and Bailey (2013): however, it is necessary to provide an overview here, as it frames the findings in this paper.

Findings of the study

The data reported in this article draws principally on the teacher interview and lesson observation data, though it is complemented, where appropriate, with student interview data. The interview coding process, described above, elicited a coding theme of Grammatical Content Knowledge. Within this theme, one set of codes related to teachers’ beliefs about their declarative knowledge of grammar (Fear, Anxiety or Inadequacy; Grammar as Technical Skill; Grammatical Confidence; and Grammatical

Discussion

Before the broader theoretical and pedagogical implications of this data are considered, and given the predilection towards deficit discourses around teachers’ grammatical content knowledge (Alderson and Horak, 2011, QCA., 1998), it is important to reiterate that the teachers in the study presented a full range of confidence in grammatical content knowledge, including those with very limited knowledge through to those with a high degree of confidence. Moreover, it is important to note that

Conclusion

To date, this study is the first to investigate how teachers’ grammatical content knowledge influences their classroom practice and shapes the nature of learning experience by students. Although drawing on a substantial sample, it is limited by its reliance on just three classroom observations per teacher, spread over three terms. Given the intensity of the debate in Anglophone countries about whether there is a role for grammar in the English/Language Arts curriculum (Myhill and Jones, 2011,

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