Abstract
Grammatical knowledge is an important part of L1 language education. Nevertheless, teachers find it challenging to convey an in-depth understanding of grammar to their students. Previous research suggests that understanding might be stimulated by focusing on grammatical reasoning. The current mixed-methods study explores the grammatical reasoning of 108 Dutch L1 student teachers’ in odd one out tasks, showing that student teachers struggle with such reasoning tasks. A multilevel regression analysis indicates that their level of grammatical understanding as measured by a Test of Grammatical Understanding (TGU) and the elaborateness of student teachers’ argumentation significantly predict the quality of their grammatical reasoning. Student teachers’ performances were also compared to 14 year old pre-university students’ performances (N = 120). Contrary to what was hypothesized, senior student teachers did not manage to outperform junior student teachers, nor did student teachers outperform pre-university students. The paper discusses plausible reasons for these findings and explores how teacher education might need to shift focus to better develop student teachers’ grammatical reasoning skills.
Highlights
While debates about the role of explicit L1 grammar teaching have been numerous over the past decades and continue to persevere until the present day, there appears to be a growing consensus that knowledge about language is an important educational goal (Fontich & Camps, 2014; Locke, 2010; Rattya, Awramiuk, & Fontich, 2019)
In the current study we investigated how well Dutch language student teachers from universities of applied sciences can reason about grammar
To investigate the effect of student teacher level, we first ran a multilevel regression model controlling for the effect of educational institute in which we explored the effect of student teacher level on reasoning scores (Z-scores) for the odd one out tasks
Summary
While debates about the role of explicit L1 grammar teaching have been numerous over the past decades and continue to persevere until the present day, there appears to be a growing consensus that knowledge about language is an important educational goal (Fontich & Camps, 2014; Locke, 2010; Rattya, Awramiuk, & Fontich, 2019). Metaconcepts such as valency can facilitate the understanding of grammatical con cepts such as subject and objects, and they have been shown to substan tially enhance both university and secondary school students’ ability to reason about unknown grammatical problems, which might be indicative of their increased grammatical understanding These studies had effect sizes ranging between .46 (Van Rijt et al, 2020a) and .62 (Van Rijt, De Swart et al, 2019), which is substantial for short educational in terventions (Calin-Jageman & Cumming, 2018). Before explaining our research methods, we will first briefly provide some necessary context about the Dutch teacher education system
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