A Study of Junior High School English Teachers' Beliefs and Practices in Grammar Instruction

• Main Authors: Ching-mei Hsieh, 謝菁梅
• Other Authors: David S. D. Tseng
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2005
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/46999202890048442019

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 93 === This study aimed to investigate junior high school English teachers’ beliefs in grammar instruction, and to what extent junior high school English teachers’ beliefs correlate with their teaching practices in grammar instruction. The data were collected through in-depth interviews and classroom observations. First, the researcher conducted the pre-observation interviews twice with the four junior high school English teacher in central Taiwan. The purposes of the first interview were to elicit the educational background of these participants and to help them familiarize with the techniques to answer the questions in the second interview more easily and fluently. The second interview was designed to elicit the four teachers’ beliefs in grammar instruction. Then, each of the four teachers was observed, audio-taped, and video-taped for one lesson unit respectively. Finally, the data from the interviews and the observations were transcribed and analyzed. Major findings were summarized as follows: First, three major components of teachers’ beliefs in grammar instruction were identified: (1) grammar teaching materials, (2) grammar teaching strategies, and (3) grammar teaching questions and answers. The main components of grammar teaching materials were composed of three sub-components: (1) the sources of grammar teaching materials, (2) the contents of grammar teaching materials, and (3) the choices of supplementary grammar teaching materials. The main components of grammar teaching strategies were composed of seven subtypes: (1) deductive teaching, (2) inductive teaching, (3) combining teaching activities, (4) mentioning grammatical terms, (5) comparing English and Chinese grammar, (6) giving students opportunities to use grammar, and (7) cooperative learning. The main components of grammar teaching questions and answers were composed of three sub-components: (1) ways of questioning which teachers would do, (2) teachers’ responses to students’ answers to the grammar questions, and (3) teachers’ encouragement of the students to ask grammar questions. Secondly, classroom practices of grammar instruction were investigated through the interviews and classroom observations. According to the results of the interviews, all of the four teachers reported that grammar should be taught by deductive teaching, combining teaching activities, and giving students opportunities to use grammar. According to the results of the classroom observations, teachers’ deductive teaching in the classroom was composed of five subtypes: (1) teaching parts of speech, (2) defining grammatical terms, (3) teaching grammatical rules, (4) exemplifying, and (5) translating. As for giving students opportunities to use grammar, it included (1) asking students to translate into English, (2) asking students to translate into Chinese, (3) correcting grammatical mistakes, and (4) answering about grammatical rules. Among these practices of grammar instruction in the classroom, the first three frequently used teaching methods were translating, mentioning grammatical terms, and teaching grammatical rules. Finally, each participant’s reported beliefs and practices in grammar teaching strategies were compared in order to identify their correlation. The results showed that the correlation between Teacher A’s reported beliefs and his classroom practices is 85.71%, Teacher B, 76.92%, Teacher C, 91.67%, and Teacher D, 90%. Despite that the four teachers’ beliefs in grammar teaching strategies did not correlate with their practices completely, the four teachers’ beliefs influenced their classroom practices profoundly. Basing on the above findings, the researcher suggests that (1) junior high school English teachers should try to implement the teaching methods which they have learned from schools, books, and colleagues in order to trigger students’ learning motivation; (2) junior high school English teachers should form teacher support groups and share their own grammar teaching methods with one another regularly; (3) junior high school English teachers should frequently introspect their beliefs and classroom practices in grammar instruction, so that they could find out the potential problems lied in their own teaching.