Assessing L2 grammar: English teachers’ accounts

Sammanfattning: Language teachers’ accounts regarding grammatical assessment have changed over the years. Researchers have presented conflicting approaches, methods and different materials language teachers can use when assessing pupils’ L2 grammar. In addition, different researchers, within the applied linguistic field, have presented and discussed what possibly can affect teachers’ accounts of underlying reasonings for certain practices. This study aims to investigate English teachers’ accounts concerning grammatical assessment and reveal what methods English teachers use, further, what underlying reasonings the teachers have for their choices. To accomplish this investigation, three semi-structured interviews with English teachers from lower secondary schools in Sweden were conducted. The interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed and analysed through thematic analysis and table-coding. The results showed that the English teachers relied on four different methods when assessing their pupils L2 grammar. Grammatical assessment methods that emphasized both a traditional- and alternative assessment approach. Furthermore, all of the English teachers had several underlying reasonings for their grammatical assessment methods. The teachers considered learners’ need, personal experiences, school system guidelines and time constraints. This study provides further insight to the grammatical assessment discussion within teaching English as a second language, and contributes with a perspective of how Swedish lower secondary English teachers work with grammatical assessment.