Explicit Grammar Instruction: In-Service Teacher Attitudes and Classroom Implementations

Sammanfattning: The importance of explicit grammar instruction has been debated during decades within the second language acquisition discourse community. Researchers’ views on the topic are controversial, and there is still no clear answer to be found. In terms of English teacher attitudes, previous research shows no indication of a gradually decreasing interest in explicit grammar instruction in L2 or FL classrooms. Despite this, the Swedish National Agency of Education does not mention explicit grammar instruction in their official documents regarding the subject of English. Hence, this paper aims to examine if the Swedish context has an impact on in-service English teachers’ attitudes towards explicit grammar instruction. To investigate their attitudes, along with their preferred approaches to explicit grammar instruction, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five English teachers at upper secondary school. The interviews were recorded, carefully analysed and partly transcribed. The results show that all of the interviewed English teachers were positive towards explicit grammar instruction and use it in their teaching. In terms of approaches to explicit grammar instruction, all of the five teachers explained that they highlight a certain grammatical rule when they notice that many of their students have a hard time with it. It is often after a writing assignment that the grammatical difficulties are revealed and will be brought up in class. The teachers tend to explain the rule by using the whiteboard, a relevant YouTube clip or a PowerPoint. An interesting finding was that all of the teachers referred to their own experience when explaining why they use a specific approach to explicit grammar instruction, whereas none of the teachers referred to research within the field. In addition, all of the interviewed teachers expressed that the official steering documents by the Swedish National Agency of Education should mention grammar instruction more explicitly. However, they were still positive towards the official documents, because of the fact that these focus on communication. The current paper provides an indication of how English teachers in Sweden prefer to work with explicit grammar instruction, along with suggestions for further research on the topic.