Abstract:

How successful students are in learning English grammar depends significantly on the teacher’s choice of an approach and the effectiveness with which the relevant principles are applied. The choice depends, among other things, on pre-service education, in which pre-service teachers are exposed to a wide range of approaches and methods to teaching grammar. In practice, however, novice teachers quickly discover that the selection and application of an effective approach is often a challenging process that does not always lead to desired results. The main reason is that, given the complexity and multidimensionality of grammar teaching, no single approach or method would encompass all aspects of the process. The article is a follow-up empirical evidence based scientific paper founded on the results of the two-year longitudinal research carried out in the group of 35 English pre-service teachers (3rd-year undergraduate up to 1st-year graduate students). Emerging research theory suggests that the beliefs and developing teacher cognition of the research subjects (its complexity) are influenced by specific teaching-learning experience inhered in a particular role, i.e., either the role of beholder or designer of the teaching process. This paper offers theoretical and practical recommendations for prospective English language teachers in order to improve English grammar teaching in primary, lower and upper secondary education in Slovakia. The offered recommendations are based on the principles of eclecticism, which, on the one hand, stems from the assumption that there is no one ideal approach to teaching grammar and, at the same time, that all instructional procedures of a language teacher should be based on stated goals, learners’ needs, actual classroom conditions, but not on the formal implementation of a particular approach or method.

Keywords:

A teacher’s beliefs, pre-service teachers, language teacher education, research, teaching English grammar, eclecticism.