Teacher beliefs have 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 reflective or higher order thinking in grammar pedagogy. In the Netherlands, this discussion plays an important role in the national development of a new curriculum. This study 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 seems to be difficult for two reasons: (1) existing textbooks fail to implement sufficient concepts from modern linguistics, nor do they stimulate reflective thinking; (2) teachers lack sufficient conceptual knowledge from linguistics necessary to adequately address reflective thinking.
This study highlights tensions and challenges experienced by language teachers in CLIL contexts. Using an example from the Netherlands, it explores the pedagogical and collaborative practices of Teachers of English in Bilingual streams (TEBs). The study shows how, using formal and practical theories, pedagogical and collaborative practices were formulated and used to investigate the beliefs and practices of language teachers in bilingual settings. The paper presents the operationalisation of 36 practices for TEBs and reports on an online survey investigating TEBs’ stated beliefs and practices. The findings suggest this set of practices has potential, both as a professional development tool for language teachers in bilingual education settings, and for further research. Results of the online survey revealed that the disciplinary identity of most Dutch TEBs leads to a focus on language, communication, literature, and language arts. TEBs are not necessarily aware of, and do not automatically consider, possibilities for expanding their own pedagogical practices in relation to subject-specific language or supporting and collaborating with their subject teacher colleagues. We suggest that policy guidelines, curricula development and teacher education programmes should pay more attention to the unique position of language teachers in these settings.
L1 grammar teaching worldwide often takes the form of traditional grammar teaching with decontextualized parsing exercises and rules of thumb. Some researchers have proposed enriching such forms of grammar teaching by relating traditional grammatical concepts to underlying metaconcepts from linguistic theory. The merits of such an approach have become apparent in recent intervention studies, but the question remains how teachers perceive such forms of grammar teaching, which is of particular importance for curriculum development. The present study investigated Dutch teachers’ beliefs in focus groups and a national survey (N = 127). It is found that Dutch language teachers see important benefits of a metaconceptual approach to grammar teaching, particularly as a means to improve students’ grammatical understanding. However, results also indicate that while teachers may see clear pedagogical and conceptual advantages of working based on underlying metaconcepts, their own teaching practice appears to be much more traditional. This discrepancy is explained by assuming that contextual factors have a restraining effect on what teachers can or want to do in reality. Once such contextual factors no longer play a part, teachers’ views tend to be much more geared towards a metaconceptual approach. The paper concludes with some implications for future research.
