“I usually just rely on my intuition and go from there.” pedagogical rules and metalinguistic awareness of pre-service EFL teachers

Abstract

Abstract The present study explores Austrian pre-service EFL teachers’ language awareness. The negative polarity properties of ‘any’ are investigated. These are informative since some of the grammatical constraints are taught in EFL instruction while others are not. The research question addresses whether pre-service teachers’ knowledge is constrained by pedagogical rules. 66 pre-service EFL teachers rated eight sentence types illustrating varying grammatical constraints on the occurrence of ‘any’ by means of paced acceptability judgement. Then knowledge of metalinguistic was assessed through untimed sentence pair assessment, open rule verbalisation, and recall of rule teaching. Results suggest that ability to distinguish grammaticality as indexed by judgements was generally high but most robust for taught properties. Metalinguistic knowledge was similarly restricted mainly to the taught pedagogical rules. Based on these results, ramifications for the role of language knowledge in EFL teacher training and avenues for further research are discussed.