“Not as boring as I thought”

Possibilities and challenges of an exploratory approach to grammar in teacher education

Abstract

In this article we describe and discuss the design and implementation of an exploratory approach to grammar teaching for student teachers. Traditional grammar teaching is typically associated with a prescriptive and deductive approach. With our teaching scheme, we wanted instead to make grammar teaching more exploratory and descriptive by letting the students take their own intuitive language competence as a starting point when dealing with concrete linguistic data. This scheme was carried out in two student groups (primary school teacher education and continuing education) at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), and our discussion is based on the students’ responses to a questionnaire and observations from the sessions. In class, we observed that the students are engaged in working with the exercises, and in the questionnaire, the students describe the session as fun and educational. The students also report a good academic takeaway, and they see a potential for an exploratory approach to grammar in their own classrooms. Seeing oneself and the pupils as language explorers was a new and useful perspective for many. The challenges of the approach relate to both the academic content and to the method itself. Several students found the exercises difficult, and they call for more instruction. Professional competence and confidence are decisive factors in the students’ own exploration, as well as when they are to carry out and support future pupils in exploratory work. We argue that an exploratory approach creates a teaching situation where the students experience rel­evance, competence, and mastery in working with grammar. At the same time, the teaching scheme should be further developed to meet both the academic and the methodological challenges.