A Taiwanese Teacher's Tensions between Grammar Teaching Beliefs and Practices

• Main Authors: Lin, Shan Chi, 林珊琪
• Other Authors: Yu, Ming Chung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/61420544170629911875

碩士 === 國立政治大學 === 英國語文學研究所 === 103 === The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate the tensions between an English teacher’s grammar teaching beliefs and practices. The participant was an experienced junior high school English teacher who had her own principles in grammar teaching and English education. Green’s (1971) distinction of core beliefs and peripheral beliefs was adopted as the framework to analyze the participant’s grammar teaching beliefs. Data were collected from multiple sources such as semi-structured interviews, classroom observations, stimulated recall interviews, and documents such as the teacher’s teaching notes and test paper. By using initial coding and second level coding, these data were carefully examined to obtain the most salient themes of the participant’s grammar teaching tensions. The findings revealed three most significant tensions between the participant’s grammar teaching beliefs and practices: tension on the use of extracurricular teaching resources, on the proportion of grammar instruction, and on the use of grammatical terminology. The participant’s tensions were mainly due to the inharmonious relationship between core beliefs and peripheral beliefs. The former were more related to teaching philosophy in general, and the latter were more related to English teaching itself. In other words, the tensions between participant’s beliefs and practices were actually the gaps between knowledge transmission perspective and ideal English teaching principles. Based on the findings of this study, some suggestions and pedagogical implications were raised for future research as well as English education field in Taiwan.