First year teacher students’ understandings and misunderstandings of descriptive grammar

Abstract

Several international studies show that teacher students and teachers have poor knowl­edge of grammar. Also in the Norwegian context, scholars have expressed their concern about a similar development. The few empirical studies that have been conducted in Norway, show that the concern is not without reason. Also, the field of grammar has had low priority in Norwegian school for the last decades. The empirical fundament for this study is a survey among 235 first year teacher students, in the period 2015–2017. Our research question is: What characterizes first year teacher students’ understandings and misunderstandings of central terms within descriptive grammar? The study differs from earlier surveys in that we aim not only to unravel the level of knowledge through a quantitative account of the number of correct, wrong, unclear and empty answers, but also to conduct a qualitative content analysis in order to reveal what the students under­stand and misunderstand, as well as other tendencies in the material.