Teachers’ aspects about Language and Classroom Practice in Teaching Grammar
Zsanna
Development of KAL
Reflecting on the development of her KAL in English, Zsanna recalled that when she started teacher training college prior to moving into teaching secondary English she immediately felt that her own level of English was inadequate:
I realized how little I knew about English grammar and about English language. For example modal verbs were completely knew for me ... the most difficult period was when I couldn’t identify what problems I should deal with and then it started to clear up and I bought all kinds of English grammar books and I started to study really hard to catch up with my mates because they obviously knew much more than me....So I started to study hard and after a while I just, I really could, I mean my performance became better and better at the college.
Her decision to respond to this situation by opting for an analytical approach to developing her KAL was not particularly surprising given that her former language education, in both Hungarian (her L1) and Russian (her first FL), had involved a similarly analytical approach to language study. In addition to the private study Zsanna engaged in, her KAL was also developed through courses in linguistics which she took at college. Although she recalls at the time thinking of these courses (also highly analytical) as ‘torture’, she later came to appreciate the insight they gave her into the logic of the English language:
we actually did very serious grammar courses ... we started to study very theoretical grammar material ... and we really found that we wouldn’t need it when teaching English grammar and we hated it. Then after a while I started to feel that it was a really good thing because at first I just started to understand things, but I couldn’t use them ... and they just started to work in my brain so I became much more confident in my language, everyday language. I mean and I started to feel that it helped.
Nonetheless, during this period Zsanna was also aware that developing her KAL in this manner was not supporting her desire to become more fluent in using the language. As she recalled, “whenever I got into a situation where I had to use my grammar I became embarrassed and I just made grammar mistakes ... I really felt ashamed”. In time, her response to this situation was to seek out contexts which made demands on her ability to use English fluently; thus, particularly once she had become a teacher of English, she started to attend professional events, where proficient interaction in English, often with native speakers of English, was required. She also involved herself in professional teachers’ groups, as these also provided her with a context in which she could hone her skills in communicating in English.
Throughout our discussions Zsanna came across as having high levels of self-awareness, reflective capacity, and strategic decision-making skills related to the development of her KAL; her decision to engage in intensive study of grammar and to seek out contexts where she would have to perform proficiently in English are two clear examples of these abilities at work. Another was the way in which she felt she monitored her own KAL and took steps to address gaps when she felt necessary:
I just put together my grammar knowledge like a jigsaw puzzle. Whenever ... I don’t have the tools to express something or I don’t feel I put it in the right way I just make some research and try to fill in this gap.
One key feature of her KAL during her preparation to be a teacher of English was that it was not explicitly linked with teaching. Linguistics courses and pedagogy courses, for example, were totally separate, and it was only when she actually started teaching English that she began to develop a more pedagogically oriented KAL. In fact, through our conversations it became clear that the instructional context had become for Zsanna the major influence in the continuing development of her KAL. Knowing grammar has assumed for her a clear pedagogical function:
Knowing grammar is [useful so] that you can plan your lessons, You also may plan what grammar points you might discuss, even if the topic is not grammar and what might be the problem for your students. One certain thing is to select and to identify problems because you know your students then also what, because you are a teacher, what aspect you know, what approach you should use. So how to help you, how to deal with the grammar. So how to demonstrate it, how to practice it. What questions you should expect and how to answer them so that your students really could use your answers.
The connections between KAL and pedagogy had in fact become so strong for her that she stated “I don’t have anything to do with grammar without teaching so everything that is grammar for me is connected to teaching”. This is a striking shift in the perspective on KAL, disconnected from pedagogy, which she had before she started teaching English.
Zsanna’s experience of the classroom had also allowed her to develop her thinking about the relationship between explicit KAL and its fluent use. In her own words:
the central issue I am interested in [is] how aware a teacher and a non-native speaker should be about his or her knowledge of grammar because my experience shows that it doesn’t always help if you know a lot about English grammar because you know it in theory but when you have to use it under the slightly little bit of stress you just can say any old things...In the classroom it is stressful ... when you teach and something unexpected happens or in any situation you have to deal with something that is unexpected or that put some stress on you, you can be mixed up and then you can’t do anything about your knowledge so there is the knowledge and there must be some instinctive knowledge also. So there are different layers of knowing foreign language and this is the most exciting for me, so how can I prepare myself and my students to deal with these situations
As a learner, she had earlier reflected on how studying English grammar did not help her become fluent; as a teacher, she was now able to reflect on the role of explicit and automatized KAL with reference both to her instructional talk and to her students’ learning.
The development of Zsanna’s KAL in English was also characterized by a high level of comparison to Hungarian grammar. From her own experience as a learner she was aware that certain aspects of English grammar, such as auxiliaries and perfect tenses, were realized very differently in Hungarian, and she recalled the difficulties which such issues had presented her as a learner. Speaking of the perfect she said:
Zsanna: It is extremely difficult, it is one of the most difficult points in English because we don’t have it in Hungarian. It is just, we don’t have the idea of it so it is very easy to learn the form and the rules about it but very difficult to use. So I, the typical case, then you know the rules, you can do the tasks, you can translate the sentence, and you can do whatever you are asked in a grammar context but when you want to use it in your every day life ... it is something that requires completely different logic. You have to turn your mind into English.
Simon: So in your own experience of learning about the perfect you feel you have had this problem too? It is not just for your students?
Zsanna: Yes
This is another example of how her awareness of the processes she experienced in developing her KAL in English impacted on her pedagogical decisions in teaching grammar; she believed that the areas of grammar she struggled to make sense of (and which she occasionally still had problems using) were the same ones her students were likely to find difficult too.
