Knowledge to teach grammar: a study of pedagogical-didactic planning with preservice teachers

Abstract

This study aims to understand the potential of written planning as an instrument to identify and characterize the knowledge of teacher trainees (TT) for teaching grammar. The study took place within the framework of educational linguistics, in the field of teaching the grammar of the Portuguese language, and in the study of the professional skills of teachers. Working plans of 42 TT were analyzed. TT were attending professional master’s degrees in Education and carrying out supervised teaching practice in classes of 3rd and 4th year of basic education. For the data treatment, the webQDA software (version 3.0) was used. Through its coding tools and matrices, we seek to find regularities and relationships between categories and subcategories, within the scope of a content analysis methodology. The results show that the written planning does not fully reflect what the TT is doing, but clearly reflects the line of thought and organization of knowledge. It is clear how that the TT will explore the grammatical content, the followed strategies to reorganize the students’ learning, the proposed tasks, the wanted type of involvement from the students; the articulation between learning objectives and planned activities. Despite being recognized the need to extend the investigation to more planning, the results already point to the pertinence of the instrument “planning-writing” in order to discuss the knowledge of the TT for teaching grammar. Training teachers must learn to plan.