Teachers' and Students' Perceptions of Effective Grammar Teaching: Comparison of Ideas
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Date
2011-05
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
The disagreement among language teaching methods and the ill-defined
guidelines on how to approach grammar has made grammar the subject of
controversy (Ellis 1994). Teachers, therefore, are confused and have
created their own personal approaches to grammar teaching. Their
personal approaches mainly are deri1.!ed from their perceptions of grammar
and grammar teaching (Borg 1999). Their perceptions inturn determine
whether and how grammar should be taught (Rohani 2010). This study,
therefore, explores and compares teachers' and students ' perceptions of
effective grammar teaching. Three fundamental research questions are
answered in this investigation. These are a} how do teachers perceive
effective grammar teaching? b} how do students perceive . effective
grammar teaching? And c} how do teachers perceive effective grammar
teaching compared with students (or the other way round)? To answer
these fundamental questions, descriptive survey study is employed. For
this study, 13% (53 students) from the total population of 417 are
randomly selected while all English teachers directly participated.
Questionnaire is used as instrument of data collection. The questionnaire
consisted of 22 restricted and 2 open-ended item are distributed to both
teachers and students. Once data is gathered, descriptive statistics and
description methods are employed to analyze it. T-test is also used to
compare their perceptions and to uniierstand how much the difference is
significant. The study finally finds that teachers perceive implicit approach
as effective while students' perceptions go to explicit approach. The finding
reveals the existence of significant difference in teachers' and students'
perceptions of effective grammar teaching. In other words, teachers think
they teach grammar best implicitly but students thinlc teachers best teach
them grammar explicitly. The existence of mismatch in any aspect is a
serious problem which can negatively affect teachers' teaching and
students' learning (Nunan 1987 cited in Tolc 2010). Therefore, to better
understand and solve the problem teachers and students may participate
in an ongoing discussion. Further research also should be conducted on
how they formulate their perceptions and the impact their perceptions have
on their teaching and learning practices. Finally, possible ways should be
explored to bridge the gap in teachers' and students ' perceptions.
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Keywords
Effective Grammar Teaching