Shaking Students’ Beliefs About Grammar: Some Thoughts on the Academic Education of Future Language Teachers

Abstract

Courses on grammar constitute a basic component of the first academic phase of language teacher education at German universities. However, it has often been reported that teacher trainees do not feel very confident about their knowledge of grammar. Furthermore, grammar is often considered as relevant, but at the same time boring, and (too) complicated. When it comes to planning their own lessons, they even seem to ignore what they (should) have learnt at university. Students come to university with beliefs about grammar and grammar teaching that influence their appraisal of the subject matter they are exposed to in seminars and lectures. Crucially, as beliefs work like filters, they determine the outcome of learning since no satisfactory learning success will be achieved if students fail to see the interesting aspects of a subject. Thus, they constrain what students turn their attention to. In this paper, I will first present the results of two explorative studies concerning beliefs about grammar (352 responses to questionnaire 1 from seven different German universities, and 37 responses to questionnaire 2 from one seminar at Leipzig University). Second, on these grounds, I shall discuss how we might get the essentials of grammar across by considering students’ beliefs. The focus of this paper is on teacher trainees of German as a subject language, the ambient language and often the (or one of the) L1 of the prospective teachers, and of their future pupils.