Patterns of Teacher Trainee Grammar Talk in Second Language Classrooms

Abstract

Literature in Language Teacher Education (LTE) has highlighted that teaching of grammar should be included as a foundational framework for all language teaching. This indicates that teacher trainees need to be trained with a firm foundation for grammar teaching in language classrooms.  Thus, an investigation on how teacher trainees taught grammar and the pattern of their grammar instruction can provide insights to teacher trainees and teacher educators on grammar teaching methodology practised in language classrooms. By understanding how teacher trainees present grammar in their classrooms and what patterns emerged from their grammar instruction can lead to ongoing process of searching for better grammar teaching in language classrooms. This article shares the findings on an investigation conducted on how and what was practised by teacher trainees in their grammar instruction. Two prevalent patterns were discovered.  Transmission technique which is teacher fronted and interaction technique which is teacher-student-teacher fronted were commonly practised by the trainees. However, the teacher-fronted technique dominates the interaction technique. This signals that teacher educators need to promote more interactive techniques in the LTE programme so that trainees are trained to teach grammar by utilising more interactive techniques such as questioning (to use more convergent and divergent questions instead of literal questions) and giving corrective feedback (to elicit and recast instead of repeating) which promote two-way grammar teaching.