Grammar Teaching Revisited: EFL Teachers between Grammar Abstinence and Formal Grammar Teaching

Abstract

The study of English language teachers’ cognitions and its relationship to teachers’ classroom practices have recently been the focus of language teaching and teacher education (Borg, 2006 & 2010). However, rarely have the studies delved into teachers’ knowledge about grammar (reviewed by Borg, 2001) or investigated the relationships between teachers’ knowledge about grammar and teachers’ actions (Borg, 2003; Sanchez, 2010). Moreover, these studies have been mostly conducted by English native speaker researchers who do not necessarily have the same cultural or linguistic background of the participants in the studies (Andrew, 2001 cited in Sanchez, 2010, p. 45). Also, they are largely confined to English native speaker teachers and few have addressed non-native speaker teachers in countries where English is a foreign language (Sanchez, 2010, p. 45). In response to these gaps in the area of second language teaching, this study investigates four English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers’ views about grammar teaching to give an aggregate picture of the way they teach grammar. The research database consists of audio-recordings of these teachers’ lessons and interviews in which they explain why they adopt a deductive or an inductive approach, how they teach grammar and how they respond to students’ errors. Implications for non-native EFL teacher education are also discussed.