Understanding complex processes in developing student teachers' knowledge about grammar

This article takes the view that grammar is driven by user choices and therefore complex and dynamic. This has implications for the teaching of grammar in language teacher education and how teachers’ cognitions about grammar, and hence their own grammar teaching, might change. The participants in this small, interpretative study, students on an MA programme in the UK, were being taught grammar from a functional perspective, but with mainly traditional classifications and metalanguage. They were required to negotiate solutions to grammar tasks designed to provoke ‘cognitive conflict’ (Tocalli-Beller 2003) when the authentic language use of the texts did not conform to the students’ prior knowledge. This was assumed to stimulate a high quality of engagement with language (EWL; Svalberg 2009), thus facilitating the construction of new or enhanced knowledge about grammar. Analysis of the participants’ learner diaries, interviews and workshop interaction reveal that cognitive conflict is an essential factor in the emergence of new understandings of complex grammar features and of grammar as meaning in context. The study contributes to the literature on inquiry based approaches to language learner education by the insights it provides into knowledge creation in such environments.