Abstract:

Teacher cognition research has provided not only a deeper insight into the choices, decisions and practices of language teachers, but also a more comprehensive insight into the specific challenges teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) face. In this framework, studies on grammar teaching has made great contribution to our understandings of how teachers teach grammar and of the cognitive framework behind their instructional practices. Correspondingly, this study reports on the EFL teachers’ beliefs about and their conceptualizations of grammar instruction in teaching English and compares how novice and experienced teachers perceive grammar instruction, examining whether there is a significant difference in their perceptions. 70 Turkish EFL teachers who work at the Prep Class of state university participated in the study. For the data collection purposes, a five-point Likert scale questionnaire with 15 items was used. According to the results, participant teachers indicated that they preferred direct grammar teaching, where rules are presented explicitly prior to student production and highlighted the necessity to learn grammar rules explicitly for effective use of target language. In general, novice and experienced teachers showed no significant difference. However, novice teachers had respectively stronger tendency towards explicit and direct grammar teaching, especially in terms of presentation of rules deductively. Experienced teachers were more flexible when it comes to teaching grammar in that they reported occasional use of both direct and indirect grammar elements in their teaching.

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