Grammar is the heart of language: grammar and its role in language learning among Finnish university students

Abstract

This article presents and discusses views on grammar and its role in formal language learning amongst Finnish university students. The results are based on a questionnaire which was distributed to students at the University of Jyvaskyla as part of institutional action research. The background to the project was a feeling amongst some teachers of increased divergence between student respectively language teacher understandings of the role of grammar in language teaching. This concern raised the need to find out how students view grammar. The knowledge about thoughts on grammar amongst students would then help teachers to adjust and adept the way grammar is used in language teaching. The main finding of the questionnaire was that a majority of the students think of grammar as a valuable asset in language learning, but at the same time have somewhat different understandings of grammar. In this context grammar is understood as a metalinguistic set of (also normative) statements of regularities in language which is the way most students think of grammar. Three different student perspectives on grammar are distinguished. These include a normative, functional and structural perspective. Since all answers in the questionnaire couldn’t be placed within these categories, a fourth category, “other” was also included.