Grammar Teaching From The Perspective Of Teacher Cognition

This dissertation presents a survey of the cognitive patterns of grammar teaching held by college teachers of English to non-English major undergraduates in the mainland of our country. On the basis of teacher cognition research in mainstream education, the author develops a framework for teacher cognition research in L2 teaching and applies it to research upon L2 teachers' cognitions about grammar teaching. It is hypothesized that (1) college teachers of English have well-established belief systems about grammar teaching and large repertoires of grammatical knowledge; (2) their individual differences have significant effects upon their belief systems about grammar teaching and repertoires of grammatical knowledge; (3) they draw their beliefs about grammar teaching from a variety of sources; (4) there are both consistencies and inconsistencies between their cognitions about grammar teaching and their common practices in the classroom; (5) their beliefs and common practices about grammar teaching significantly differ from their students' beliefs about grammar learning.To test these hypotheses, a survey is conducted with the participation of 392 teachers of English to non-English major undergraduates and 884 non-English major freshmen and sophomores from 14 colleges and universities in Shandong Province. The instruments adopted are a battery of four questionnaires: (1) Teachers' Beliefs Questionnaire, which is composed of five-point Likert statements and open-ended questions, (2) Teachers' Grammatical Knowledge Questionnaire, which consists of testing items of both objective and subjective types, (3) Teachers' Common Practices Questionnaire, which comprises five-point Likert statements and open-ended questions, and (4) Students' Beliefs Questionnaire, which is totally made up of five-point Likert statements.Data from the Teachers' Beliefs Questionnaire show that not only do the participant teachers accept the general principles of communicative language teaching, but they also integrate traditional ways of grammar teaching. The four individual differences—working contexts, academic degrees, years of teaching and research interest—all make a significant difference in their beliefs about grammar teaching. However, the difference is only identified in their beliefs about traditional grammar teaching, and no difference is found in their beliefs about communicative grammar teaching. In addition, the participant teachers draw their beliefs from a variety of sources, with teaching experiences and previous English learning experiences heading the list. However, only around a fifth of the respondents cite professional coursework and academic research as their belief sources. With the exception of working contexts, their individual differences also have significant impacts upon their belief sources.Data from the Teachers' Grammatical Knowledge Questionnaire reveal that the participant teachers achieve only a little more than half of the total score. Except academic degrees, none of their individual differences have significant effects upon their amount of grammatical knowledge. What is more, no matter whether the participant teachers are treated as a whole or divided according to the four individual differences, their mean scores of the four sections in the Teachers' Grammatical Knowledge Questionnaire roughly share a similar distributional pattern: Error correction ranks first, which is then successively followed by metalanguage recognition, metalanguage production and error explanation.Comparisons of data from the Teachers' Beliefs Questionnaire and the Teachers' Common Practices Questionnaire demonstrate that the participant teachers' beliefs about grammar teaching are correlated with their common practices; however, there are also significant discrepancies between the two. On the other hand, comparisons of data from the Teachers' Grammatical Knowledge Questionnaire and the Teachers' Common Practices Questionnaire indicate that there is almost no correlation between their amount of grammatical knowledge and their common practices. Moreover, comparisons of data from the Teachers' Beliefs Questionnaire and the Students' Beliefs Questionnaire and comparisons of data from the Teachers' Common Practices Questionnaire and the Students' Beliefs Questionnaire suggest that the participant teachers' beliefs and their common practices about grammar teaching both significantly differ from their students' beliefs about grammar learning. The findings of the present survey have many an implication for L2 grammar teaching and its research, L2 teacher educational programs, L2 teachers' self-developments, and contextual problems of college English teaching to non-English major undergraduates. However, teacher cognition is complex in nature and questionnaire-based surveys have their unavoidable drawbacks. The present survey, which is only a tentative exploration, needs to be confirmed and complemented by more research. Therefore, toward the end of the dissertation, some suggestions for further research are offered in the hope that an appropriate model for L2 teacher education and self-developments would be constructed so as to fundamentally promote foreign language teaching reform in our country.