Grammar and the non-native secondary school teacher in Catalonia

Abstract

This study describes the grammar-related behaviours of three experienced non-native teachers of English working in state secondary schools in Catalonia and investigates what beliefs may explain, from the teachers' point of view, these behaviours; it also examines what factors in their turn determine these beliefs. The results uncover three essentially different approaches to metatalk, which have their origins in complex and varied relationships between cognitive, experiential and contextual factors.

Keywords:

• teacher cognitions
• metatalk
• grammar teaching
• teaching behaviour
• non-native teacher of English

Acknowledgements

This paper is based on Isabel Pahissa's Master's thesis titled ‘How much grammar do we teach? Why? A case study of three teachers' (2003) for the University of Barcelona’ postgraduate program in Applied Linguistics and it was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education (HUM2007-64302/FILO) and the Generalitat de Catalunya (2005SGR00778). We are grateful to two anonymous Language Awareness reviewers for their insights and helpful comments. Finally, we would like to thank the three teachers who participated in this study. Without their collaboration, this investigation would not have been possible.

Notes

1. The dichotomy native/non-native is used throughout the paper because today these are widely used terms in the profession, both by teachers and researchers. However, we are aware of the existence of linguistic, ideological and pragmatic arguments against the use of these terms.

2. Initially six teachers were contacted and three of them agreed to participate in the study.

3. Secondary schooling in Spain consists of four years of compulsory education (ESO) and two years of non-compulsory education (batxillerat).

4. In Catalonia, the English part of this exam consists of a listening comprehension test (20% of the whole mark), a reading comprehension test (40%) and a composition (40%). There is no oral assessment.

5. Writing conferences can be defined as a forum in which students receive one-on-one feedback from the teacher concerning their writing.

6. Classroom observations were discarded because there is little tradition of this practice in Catalan schools and conducting them would have been a problem for the teachers. In addition, the main researcher in the study was teaching full time at the time and had the same schedule as the participating teachers, which made it impossible for her to attend other teachers' classes for observation.