Portuguese teachers’ perceptions of grammar teaching

The teaching of grammar, as envisaged in the official curriculum, has been identified as challenging for many Portuguese teachers. In this paper, we present a study conducted with the aim of characterizing primary and middle school teachers’ perceptions about their own grammar teaching, utilizing Shulman’s model (1987) as adapted by Grossman (1990). We carried out a collective case study, using a questionnaire survey (n=200 teachers) to determine the importance teachers attach to teaching grammar, the degree of perceived adequacy of their knowledge and the difficulties they identify in this area of their teaching. The results reveal that teachers’ perceptions are shaped by multiple decisive factors including content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, knowledge of the curricula and general educational knowledge. Based on these findings, we advocate the need to rethink how teachers are trained and to (re) create awareness about the complexity of knowledge in grammar teaching and its role in effective student learning.This work benefited from financial support by national funds provided by Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT/MCTES-PT). The first author was funded by CIEC (Center for Research in Child Studies at the University of Minho) project UID/CED/00317/2019. The second author was funded by CIEd – Research Centre on Education, project UID/CED/01661/2019, Institute of Education, University of Minho. The third author was funded by the Centre of Linguistics of the University of Porto, FCT UID/LIN/022/2016.Cristina Vieira da Silva: cristina.vieira@esepf.ptÍris Susana Pires Pereira: iris@ie.uminho.ptIsabel Sebastião: isabel.sebastiao@hotmail.comCristina Vieira da Silva completed her PhD in Linguistics in 2003. She is currently a Coordinator Professor at the Higher School of Education of Paula Frassinetti in Porto and a member of CIEC (Research Centre on Child Studies) at the University of Minho. Her areas of research cover language teaching and learning, literacy education, reading, writing and grammar teaching.Íris Susana Pires Pereira is a member of the Research Center on Education (CIEd) at the Institute of Education, University of Minho, in Portugal, where she holds the position of Assistant Professor of language and literacy education. Her research focuses on language and literacy learning in the early years, with a particular interest in the specialised forms of the language of schooling, now including digital resources for meaning making. 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