Abstract
Teacher beliefshave been shown to play a major role in shaping educational practice, especially in the area of grammar teaching―an area of language education that teachers have particularly strong views on. Traditional grammar education is regularly criticized for its focus on rules-of-thumb rather than on insights from modern linguistics, and for its focus on lower order thinking. A growing body of literature on grammar teaching promotes the opposite, arguing for more linguistic conceptual knowledge and re-flective or higher order thinking in grammar pedagogy. In the Netherlands, this discussion plays an im-portant role in the national development of a new curriculum.Thisstudy explores current Dutch teachers’ beliefs on the use of modern linguistic concepts and reflective judgment in grammar teaching. To this end, we conducted a questionnaire among 110 Dutch language teachers from secondary education and analyzed contemporary school textbooks likely to reflect existing teachers’ beliefs. Results indicate that teachers generally appear to favor stimulating reflective judgement in grammar teaching, although implementing activities aimed at fostering reflective thinking seemsto be difficult for two reasons: (1) existing textbooks fail to implement sufficient concepts from modern linguis-tics, nor do they stimulate reflective thinking; (2) teachers lack sufficient conceptual knowledge from lin-guistics necessary to adequately address reflective thinking.
Original language | English |
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Pages (from-to) | 1-29 |
Number of pages | 29 |
Journal | L1 - Educational Studies in Language and Literature |
Volume | 19 |
Publication status | Published - 9 Apr 2019 |
Externally published | Yes |