Å sammenligne grammatiske trekk i elevenes språk – lærerrefleksjoner fra en studie i grammatikk- og flerspråklighetsdidaktikk

Abstract

The article explores the reflections of five teachers after carrying out an awakening-to-languages-approach (éveil aux langues) to grammar teaching in Norwegian as an upper secondary subject. It is a design-based study at the intersection between plurilingualism and grammar teaching that stems from the need for more practical research on grammar teaching and on how the resource perspective on plurilingualism can be operationalized. The data consists of the teachers’ oral and written evaluations after completing a course of teaching in which the students worked in groups with language comparison tasks. The article’s overarching question is: How do the teachers in this study reflect on comparing grammatical features in the students’ different languages in grammar teaching? The overarching question is operationalized through two research questions (1) What forms of language awareness among the students emerge in the teachers’ reflections on what the students have learned and experienced from comparing grammatical features in their own and their fellow students’ languages? (2) What challenges do the teachers experience with this teaching approach?

The findings indicate that language comparison, according to the teachers, increases the students’ metalinguisticawareness, and using the students’ own languages and language variants for this purpose increases the students’ criticallanguage awareness. At the same time, the teachers experience that the teaching is difficult to carry out due to their own lack of competence, time and subject constraints in the subject Norwegian, and the students lack of knowledge of and experience with comparative approaches to grammar.