Knowing in order to intervene: conceptions of primary school teachers in São Tomé and Príncipe on teaching and learning grammar

Abstract

As part of the implementation of a primary school teachers training project in São Tomé and Príncipe, we sought to diagnose their perceptions about grammatical teaching and learning. Situated in the context of Educational Linguistics and in the domain of teaching grammar in particular (Spolsky, 1999), our objective was to know the perceptions that these teachers had about their professional knowledge in the teaching of grammar, in the light of the model proposed by Shulman (1987) and adapted by Grossman (1990). The choice of the methodological framework of investigation fell on the collective case study. We present the results of a questionnaire survey, collected from a sample of 122 teachers, aiming to identify the importance attributed and the frequency with which they worked on grammatical knowledge; the perceived degree of adequacy regarding their own knowledge of the content and pedagogical knowledge, as well as the difficulties identified both in the teaching as well as in the grammar learning process. The results point to a complexity of factors involved in the construction of these perceptions and in grammar teaching process: content knowledge, didactic content knowledge and also curricular knowledge. Based on these results, we problematize the teaching of grammar, stressing that the weaknesses identified in these dimensions lead teachers to take inconsistent pedagogical options and result in the inability to reflect and take responsibility for the teaching-learning process.