When teaching grammar, one of the biggest challenges teachers face is how to make their students achieve conceptual understanding. Some scholars have argued that metaconcepts from theoretical linguistics should be used to pedagogically and conceptually enrich traditional L1 grammar teaching, generating more opportunities for conceptual understanding. However, no empirical evidence exists to support this theoretical position. The current study is the first to explore the role of linguistic metaconcepts in the grammatical reasoning of university students of Dutch Language and Literature. Its goal was to gain a better understanding of the characteristics of students’ grammatical conceptual knowledge and reasoning and to investigate whether students’ reasoning benefits from an intervention that related linguistic metaconcepts to concepts from traditional grammar. Results indicate, among other things, that using explicit linguistic metaconcepts and explicit concepts from traditional grammar is a powerful contributor to the quality of students’ grammatical reasoning. Moreover, the intervention significantly improved students’ use of linguistic metaconcepts.
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.
Educational linguistics lays at the interface of contributions from linguistics (in our case focused on L1) and education. It aims at teaching students in compulsory schooling how to engage in fruitful reflection when facing both language in use (especially in the written mode) and language as a system, approaching language as something worthwhile exploring and targeting the development of students’ encyclopaedic knowledge about it. In this context, the educational game can be seen as a process in which specific contents are made accessible to specific learners through mediation, which comprises well-articulated conceptual systems, as well as methodological procedures, directly provided by teachers in the classroom. Nonetheless, such mediation can indirectly be provided by other agents (curriculum theorists, linguists, material designers, etc.), and this is the focus of the papers in this special issue: the role of linguistics, teachers’ beliefs and preparedness, the role of grammar in the curriculum, the concepts of sentence, and the difficulties in linking grammar knowledge and knowledge on language use. The ulti- mate goal of this special issue is to contribute a common ground for a debate.
