Teachers' Beliefs About Grammar And Grammar Teaching

Grammar teaching continues to be a matter of controversy in the field of Applied Linguistics and Second Language Acquisition. Work over recent years has led to the adoption of new taxonomies for grammar instruction, based around the distinction, originally made by Long (1991), between Focus on Forms, Focus on Form and Focus on Meaning approaches. After reviewing the previous studies on this topic, this study was undertaken to investigate teachers'beliefs about grammar and grammar teaching in Chinese EFL context, aimed to establish the option favored by some Chinese university and college English teachers. To be specific, the study addressed the following research questions:1) Which beliefs about grammar and grammar teaching are most widely held by Chinese university and college teachers?2) Is there a bias towards decontextualised presentation of grammar and away from discourse-based, unified approaches?This study used a questionnaire adapted from Burgess and Etherington (2002), followed by several interviews with volunteer respondents. Thirty-eight Chinese EFL teachers to non-English major undergraduates participated in the questionnaire survey for collecting the quantitative data, and it was analyzed by SPSS 16.0. Six of those thirty-eight participants involved in the interviews for collecting the qualitative data. Teachers'responses mainly focused on"the role of grammar","explicit grammar teaching approach","teaching grammar in the complete texts", and"error correction". The data analysis generated the following major findings:1. The majority of teachers in this study hold that grammatical knowledge is very important to students, and they have a sophisticated understanding of the problems and issues involved in its teaching. This result may be surprising in light of researches reported earlier which suggest that grammar may not hold so much weight for teachers.2. The Chinese college English teachers in this study favor the treatment of grammatical features through its emergence in whole texts, rather than its presentation in decontextualised sentences and structures. And Chinese college English teachers prefer to deal with grammatical issues as they arise from the texts used to develop students'skills. From this point, teachers support an approach tending to Focus on Form. This finding accords with the result of Zhang Cunxiang's survey that the majority of subjects in her study appreciated the Focus on Form approach to grammar teaching. And it's different from Zhang Zhongqin's conclusion that Chinese college English teachers supported Focus on FormS approach.3. From teachers'feedbacks to explicit grammar teaching, practice and error correction. It can be concluded that teachers'treatment of the emerging grammatical issues is generally far from the'transitory'remediation suggested by many proponents of a FonF strategy. In addition, students'expectations, preferences, and needs influence teachers'actions of grammar teaching in class.4. Another important finding of this study accords with the finding of Borg & Burns's (2008) survey that the absence among the respondents of any professional language, such as"focus on form", despite the generally high level qualification held by the majority of the participants. Teachers'atheoretical standpoint raises interesting questions on the role of theory in second language teachers'development and practice.This study settles a foundation for a better understanding of college English teachers'thoughts and feelings about grammar teaching in China. And it may provide a clue for the reform of college English grammar teaching and also give the teachers a chance to reflect their own beliefs and practice activities. The present survey is only a tentative exploration, still exists some limitations. Some suggestions for the further research are offered in the end of the study.