Browsing by Subject "grammar"

According to the recent draft of the renewed Finnish national core curriculum, the basic concepts of grammar are to be learned already in the primary school when they are taught by a classroom teacher. As the basis of metalinguistic awareness, the grammatical concepts are complex and abstract, and a body of research evidence has raised public worry about the teachers' insufficient pedagogical content knowledge in this area; some authorities have even suggested replacing the classroom teachers, who receive very little grammar instruction during their training, with subject teachers of Finnish as the mother tongue in the fifth and sixth grades of basic education. This study aims at understanding student teachers' grammatical thinking from the point of view of the sentence elements subject and object, both usually taught during the fifth grade. I research the students' capability of identifying and defining the sentence elements and the minitheories they used in this cognitive process. I also study the relation between each minitheory and success in the grammar test. The study is part of a project that evaluates the student teachers' grammatical content knowledge, for which the data was collected in 2011. The students (N = 128) took a grammar test in which they identified the sentence elements, explained the strategies they used in the task, and also marked a fifth-grader's grammar test. I studied the minitheories using content analysis of the open-ended questions and examined their effectiveness with quantitative methods. I also considered the students' earlier performance in the national matriculation exam in relation to the level of grammatical content knowledge pictured by the test. The students were familiar with the concepts of subject and object as well as their semantic definitions but only 9.4 % of the participants managed to identify all the five subjects, and 21 % of them all the four objects. The separate and content-based analysis of the minitheories of subject and object showed that the students searched for both of them by using the same minitheories that I call semantic, syntactic, interrogative, and morphological. The morphological minitheory appeared effective in both cases, the syntactic minitheory in the subject tasks, and a combination of many minitheories in the object tasks. Therefore, the teacher education needs to put emphasis on the students' content knowledge in order to ensure that they have the profound grammatical understanding required by the curriculum.