Student teachers’ collaborative construction of grammar awareness: the case of a highly competent learner

Abstract

The paper investigates how a student on a master’s-level teacher education course for English language teachers goes about constructing her grammar knowledge. The learner is a novice teacher with English as a foreign language. Learner diary, interview, and group interaction data were analysed thematically, revealing that she made relatively few, usually brief, verbal contributions to the group work but was nonetheless a very active and competent participant. One of her main strategies was ‘listening to others’. At the same time, important learning skills allowed her to identify, create, and make use of learning opportunities. She is contrasted with another learner who speaks considerably more and is a risk-taker. The central argument to emerge is that the learners are each enacting their individual identities. How learners approach the construction of knowledge is therefore unique to each learner; there are a number of ways of being a ‘competent learner’.

Keywords:

• teacher knowledge
• grammar
• interaction
• metalinguistic awareness
• consciousness-raising

Acknowledgements

We are grateful for a small research grant from the School of Education, University of Leicester towards this study and to anonymous reviewers and Dr Jim King (University of Leicester) for their generous, constructive advice. Any remaining weaknesses or errors are entirely our own.

Notes

1. ‘Engagement’ as used by Wenger (1998) and ‘EWL’ as defined in Svalberg (2009) overlap but are not synonymous.

2. In Workshop 4 Isabelle took 128 turns (1188 words; 9.3 w/turn) and Emily 98 turns (565 words; 5.8 w/turn).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Agneta M.-L. Svalberg

Agneta M.-L. Svalberg teaches and supervises in applied linguistics and TESOL in master's and doctoral courses at the University of Leicester. She is particularly interested in grammar, from both a theoretical perspective (in particular tense-modality-aspect) and the teaching/learning perspective. In her teaching of English grammar to English as a foreign language (EFL) teachers she uses a language awareness-raising approach.

Jim Askham

Jim Askham is a teaching fellow in the MA applied linguistics and TESOL/MA TESOL programmes at the School of Education, University of Leicester, UK. His current teaching and research interests are in the areas of language teacher education, language awareness, and learner identity issues.