Applied Linguistics and Language Teacher Education by Nat Bartels

298 TRAINEES’ KNOWLEDGE OF GRAMMARgrammar leads to improvements in writing. While the NLS lists items of grammar forcertain ages, as in Table 1, it gives no evidence that these are appropriate, useful orindeed ‘learnable’ at those ages. In addition, the linguistic specification is flawed. Sealeyargued that its: “underlying conceptions of language are not consistent with an evidencebaseddescription of the language” (1999a: 15) unlike the LINC training materials.She also expressed similar reservations about the mandatory teacher educationcurriculum (Sealey, 1999b), another case of policy not drawing on evidence fromapplied linguistics. Cajkler (1999) observed that teachers often encounterincomprehensible advice about English in the NLS e.g. sometimes there are three tenses,sometimes two and in one place four (DfEE, 1998: 90).Whatever the outcome of current debates about the value of grammar, trainees have a‘grammar mountain’ to climb. Before 2001, when we began the research reported in thischapter, we offered differentiated ‘language’ workshops followed by group andindividual support sessions, focusing on subject knowledge and how to explaingrammar. Subject content included a self-access language study guide, two lectures onthe structure of language and two on language in social context (an overloadedcurriculum permitted no more input).This provision had undergone ongoing refinement and was informed by researchconducted on 502 trainees between 1997-2001 through audits (short tests of linguisticknowledge), questionnaires and interviews (Cajkler and Hislam, 2002). This confirmedthat most trainees came to the course with significant grammatical awareness but thiswas nevertheless the subject of uncertainty and occasional misconception. Traineesreported dependence on school experience of learning that ‘a verb is a doing word’, that‘an adjective is a describing word’ leading to explanations of the type ‘jump is a verbbecause it is a doing word’. They had had little experience of explicit grammar teachingnor any significant experience of discussing language in ways described in the NLS.These findings reflected other similar studies (Myhill, 2000, Williamson and Hardman,1995). Our provision sought to address these misconceptions and in exit audits in 2000and 2001 there were higher scores in activities that required the naming of parts andclassification of sentence types. So, we could argue that grammatical knowledgeimproved during the PGCE year, and indeed no one failed the mandatory literacy testintroduced in 2001. This showed, at least for the assessment of subject knowledge, thatwe addressed trainees’ needs. But, to what extent and how were trainees activelyteaching grammar in support of the NLS objectives?RESEARCH FOCUSWhat we knew far less about, despite the use of the exit audits and interviews in 2000and 2001, was how trainees developed their grammatical knowledge and how they usedtheir knowledge for teaching. We did not assume, unlike NLS curriculum developers,that there would be a simple relationship between the provision that we made fortrainees and the subsequent learning of pupils in schools. To explore how they were