Studying teacher cognition in second languagegrammar teaching

S. Borg*School of Education, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK

Received 8 May 1998; revised 10 July 1998; accepted 1 September 1998

Abstract

Although formal instruction in second language (L2) teaching has been extensivelyresearched in the last 20 years, this work tells us little about the actual processes of grammar

teaching as these are perceived by teachers. At the same time, educational research has shownthat much can be learned about the nature of instruction through the study of teachercognitionÐthe store of beliefs, knowledge, assumptions, theories, and attitudes about allaspects of their work which teachers hold and which have a powerful impact on teachers'

classroom practices. Studies of teacher cognition have also begun to appear in the ®eld of L2teaching in recent years, yet formal instruction, inexplicably, has received little attention. Thispaper makes a case for research on teacher cognition in grammar teaching. Such research,

which focuses on understanding how teachers approach formal instruction, and why, can tellus much about the nature of grammar teaching as teachers perceive it, information which canbe put to e�ective use in teacher education and development programmes. # 1999 Published

by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

Keywords: Teacher cognition; Teacher thinking; Grammar teaching; Second language teaching;

Classroom research

1. Introduction

The impetus for this paper can be summarised in three observations aboutresearch on L2 teaching and teaching in general in the last 20 years:

1. Formal instruction has been one of the most researched aspects of L2 teaching.Yet not only has this research been largely inconclusive in identifying optimal

SYSTEMSystem 27 (1999) 19±31

0346-251X/99/$Ðsee front matter # 1999 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

PII: S0346-251X(98)00047-5

*E-mail: S.Borg@education.leeds.ac.uk

strategies for grammar learning, it has actually provided very little insight into theactual processes of L2 grammar teaching as these are perceived by teachers.

2. Educational research has acknowledged a conception of teachers as active,thinking, decision-makers whose instructional decisions are powerfully in¯u-enced by their cognitions about teaching and learning. Research on teaching hasthus focused increasingly on describing what teachers actually do in classroomsand on understanding the cognitions which underlie these practices. Thisresearch has in turn been utilised by teacher educators to promote the develop-ment of re¯ective skills in teachers at both preservice and inservice levels.

3. Although teacher cognition research in the ®eld of L2 teaching has increased inrecent years, the teaching of grammar has attracted meagre attention. Thus wepossess little descriptive data about L2 teachers' practices in formal instructionand even less insight into the cognitions which underlie these practices. In thelight of observations 1 and 2, this is clearly a gaping hole in the researchagenda for L2 teaching.

My aim here is to make the case for the study of teacher cognition in L2 grammarteaching by expanding on each of these points with reference to the literatureon both grammar teaching and teacher cognition. Findings from a recent project onteacher cognition in L2 grammar teaching are also presented to illustrate thepotential such work has for expanding our current understandings of the processesof formal instruction.

2. L2 Grammar teaching

Grammar has been the focus of vast amounts of research on L2 acquisition (seeEllis, 1994, for review). An illustrative list of issues addressed by this work is pre-sented in Table 1.There are three points I want to make about this research:

1. Firstly, this work has been largely inconclusive (Ellis, 1998). Although it is nowgenerally accepted that formal instruction does facilitate in some way the pro-cess of learning a L2 (Ellis, 1994), a reading of the sources listed in Table 1shows that consensus about how best to teach grammar has not been achieved.

Table 1

Research on formal instruction

Issues Sources

Should teachers teach grammar at all? Krashen, 1981; Bialystok, 1982;

Pienemann, 1985; Lightbown and

Spada, 1990; Gass, 1991

Are inductive approaches to grammar

better than deductive approaches?

Sha�er, 1989; DeKeyser, 1995

Should teachers correct students' grammatical errors? Chaudron, 1977; DeKeyser, 1993

Should teachers use grammatical terminology in class? Berman, 1979; Garrett, 1986

Do grammar practice activities facilitate L2 learning? Ellis, 1991; K. Johnson, 1994

20 S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31

For example, while Garrett argues against the use of grammatical terminologyin L2 teaching, Berman outlines the value of doing so; and while K. Johnsonargues that grammar practice activities enhance L2 acquisition, Ellis reviewsresearch which does not support such an assertion. Thus, after over 20 yearsof research, ``it is probably premature to reach any ®rm conclusions regardingwhat type of formal instruction works best'' (Ellis, 1994, p. 646). In attemptingto understand how teachers approach formal instruction, and why, then, wecannot even start with the assumption that their decisions are informed by awell-de®ned research base providing ®rm guidelines for practice.1

2. Secondly, much of this research has been experimental in nature. That is, toidentify e�ective strategies for teaching grammar, researchers have set-upinstructional contexts in which the e�ects on student achievement of di�erentstrategies can be compared (for two examples, see Fotos, 1993; DeKeyser,1995). Such work tells us nothing about teachers' decision-making processes inteaching grammar in natural settings. In fact, a criterion for judging the valid-ity of much of this research has been the extent to which teachers' ability tomake decisions is curtailed (see, for example, Sha�er, 1989, p. 400, who out-lined how she ``minimized the teacher factor as much as possible'').

3. A substantial amount of descriptive research on grammar teaching in naturally-occurring settings has also been conducted (e.g. Faerch, 1985, 1986; Peck,1988; Lightbown and Spada, 1990; Lyster and Ranta, 1997). Yet none of thesestudies have investigated the teacher cognitions underlying the practicesdescribed. Peck (1988) does claim to provide an emic (i.e. insider) perspectiveon teachers' work, but what he actually provides is his own interpretation ofhow they approach grammar, ``in terms they [teachers] do not habitually use''(p. 128).

What we have, then, is a large volume of research on formal instruction whichparadoxically fails to contribute at all to an understanding of the process of gram-mar teaching as it is perceived by teachers.

3. Teacher cognition

For many years educational research was characterised by studies which explorede�ective teaching

by correlating particular processes, or teaching behaviors, with particular pro-ducts, usually de®ned as student achievement as measured by standardized tests... Underlying this view of research is a view of teaching as a primarily linear

1The word start is important here, for even if a well-de®ned research base about e�ective grammer

teaching did exist, studies of teacher cognition in other disciplines (e.g. Crawley and Slayer, 1995, in sci-

ence education) suggest that teachers' instructional decisions would not necessarily be in¯uenced by this

research.

S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31 21

activity wherein teaching behaviors are considered `causes' and student learningis regarded as `e�ects'. This approach emphasizes the actions of teachers ratherthan their professional judgments and attempts to capture the activity ofteaching by identifying sets of discrete behaviors reproducible from one teacherand one classroom to the next (Cochran-Smith and Lytle, 1990, p. 2).

This is, of course, the notion of teaching implicit in most research on formalinstruction. The last 20 years, though, have seen the gradual emergence of an alter-native conception of teaching as a process of active decision-making informed byteachers' cognitionsÐthe beliefs, knowledge, theories, assumptions, and attitudesabout all aspects of their work which teachers have. This conception of teaching hasbeen developed through an ever-growing body of research; as Table 2 illustrates,very selectively, teacher cognition has been studied in a range of diverse instructionalsettingsÐin both preservice and inservice contexts, at various levels (kindergarten,elementary, secondary, high school, college, and adult education), and with respectto a wide range of subjects (e.g. English, mathematics) and speci®c aspects of sub-jects (e.g. vocabulary, geometry).The signi®cant body of such work which now exists indicates that teachers' cog-

nitions consist of a set of personally-de®ned practically-oriented understandings ofteaching and learning which exert a signi®cant in¯uence on instructional decisions(Clark and Peterson, 1986; Clandinin and Connelly, 1987; Kagan, 1990; Pajares,1992; Fang, 1996). The widely acknowledged implication of this work is that anunderstanding of the often implicit psychological bases of teachers' work is requiredif we are to go beyond a super®cial behavioural conception of instructional pro-cesses. That is, comprehending the process of teaching means both describingteachers' actions and accessing the cognitions underlying these.The insight into teaching which teacher cognition research provides, in turn, has

various applications, summarised in Table 3, for teachers, teacher educators, andpolicy makers.

Table 2

The scope of teacher cognition research

Source Focus

Beach, 1994 Elementary teachers' beliefs about teaching reading.

Brickhouse, 1990 Science teachers' beliefs about the nature of science.

Briscoe, 1991 A high school chemistry teacher's beliefs and metaphors.

Brown and Wendel, 1993 Beginning secondary teachers' beliefs about lesson planning.

Dirkx and Spurgin, 1992 Adult basic education teachers' beliefs about students.

Konopak and Williams, 1994 Elementary teachers' beliefs about vocabulary teaching.

Peterson et al., 1989 Elementary teachers' pedagogical content beliefs and

pedagogical content knowledge in mathematics.

Smith and Shepard, 1988 Kindergarten teachers' beliefs about children's school readiness.

Swa�ord et al., 1997 Inservice teachers' content and pedagogical

knowledge of geometry.

Uhlenberg et al., 1993 Preservice and classroom teachers' beliefs about discipline.

Wyatt and Pickle, 1993 College reading instructors' beliefs about teaching.

22 S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31

Most relevant for this current paper is the observation that teacher cognitionresearch can inform the process of teacher education. In other words, it has practicaland not simply theoretical value (thus such research has pragmatic validityÐKvale,1996). I discuss this issue in more detail later.

4. Teacher cognition in L2 teaching

Although the need for research into the psychological context of L2 teaching hasbeen pointed out over the years (Seliger, 1979; Faerch, 1985, 1986), it is only rela-tively recently that such work has begun to appear. Table 4 summarises the insightprovided by this work into the relationship between cognition and practice in L2teaching.2

This research supports the ®nding in the educational literature that, althoughcontextual factors may prevent teachers from acting in accordance with their cog-nitions, the latter are a very powerful in¯uence on classroom practice. However,none of these studies have focused speci®cally on grammar teaching. In fact, theonly research on language teaching which does shed light on teachers' perspectiveson formal instruction is that which examined the knowledge about language' (KAL)component of the National Curriculum in the UK (Mitchell et al., 1994a,b Brum®tet al., 1996). Given my current concerns, the most signi®cant ®nding here was thatinadequate knowledge of metalinguistic terminology on teachers' part made themreluctant to use such terminology in their teaching. There was one other paper which

Table 3

Applications of research on teacher cognition

Insight into teachers' conditions allow us

^ to understand discrepancies between theoretical recommendations based on

research and classroom practice and hence to attempt to explain the lack of

in¯uence on practice of educational innovation (Clark and Peterson, 1986),

^ to provide quality portraiture of teaching in all its complexity (Clark and Lampert, 1986),

^ to provide policy makers in education and teacher education with the basis for

understanding how best to implement educational innovation and to promote

teacher change (Butt et al., 1992),

^ to engage teachers in a form of re¯ective learning, by making them aware of the

psychological bases of their classroom practice; to help teachers understand their

mental lives, not to dictate practice to them (Clark and Lampert, 1986),

^ to understand how teachers develop (Tobin and LaMaster, 1995),

^ to develop a new conceptualisation of teaching which supports and improves the

quality of teachers' professional practice (Calderhead, 1987),

^ to provide the basis of e�ective pre- and inservice teacher education and

professional development (Goodman, 1988).

2 The ®ndings I summarise here relate solely to the relationship between cognition and practice; for

many of these studies, this was but one of a range of issues investigated.

S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31 23

promised to say something about teacher cognition in L2 grammar teaching(Williams, 1994), but closer analysis indicated otherwise. This paper reports on theviews about grammar and grammar teaching expressed by teachers on an MA coursethrough their responses to a structured questionnaire containing 6 items (plus a 7thitem labelled `Other comments?'; Williams, 1994, p. 118). Although the outcomes ofthis study may be useful for individuals planning MA courses, such work doesnot investigate teachers' classroom practices or the cognitions which shape these.Thus, despite its super®cial promise (it appears in a text called `Grammar and the

Table 4

L2 teacher cognition research

Source Findings

Bailey, 1996 Teachers' in-class decisions to depart from their lesson plan were based on

these principles: (1) serve the common good; (2) teach to the moment;

(3) further the lesson; (4) accommodate students' learning styles; (5) promote

students' involvement; and (6) distribute the wealth.

Breen, 1991 Teachers' instructional decisions were in¯uenced by concerns about:

learners' a�ective involvement, background knowledge, and cognitive

processes; conceptions of language as use and usage; and teacher role as

guide and manager.

Burns, 1992 Teachers' practices were in¯uenced by a network of beliefs they held

about language, beginning language learning, and learners.

Burns, 1996 Teachers' practices were shaped by beliefs relating to the institutional

culture of the school they worked in, their own personal beliefs about

language, learners, and learning, and their beliefs about speci®c

instructional tasks and materials.

K.E. Johnson, 1992 A signi®cant statistical relationship was found between teachers'

theoretical orientations to L2 learning and teaching and their

instructional practices.

K.E. Johnson, 1994 Teachers' instructional practices were in¯uenced by their personal images

of L2 teaching and learning.

Nunan, 1992 Most of the interactive decisions made by a teacher re¯ected this teachers personal

philosophy of language teaching.

Richards, 1996 Teachers' instructional decisions were guided by maximsÐpersonal

working principles which re¯ect teachers' individual philosophies of

teaching.

Practice sometimes does not re¯ect teachers' maxims because of

contextual factors such as the need to prepare students for examinations or

student characteristics (e.g. shyness).

Smith, 1996 Teachers' beliefs about second language teaching and learning were the

critical factor in in¯uencing the types of decisions these teachers made.

The contextual factor which had most impact on teachers' decisions was

student characteristicsÐtheir goals, interests, and a�ective states.

Ulichny, 1996 A teacher planned her lesson with reference to her principles about L2

teaching and the nature of L2 reading. During the lesson, the teacher

modi®ed her plan on the basis of unexpected di�culties which the students

had understanding the text she selected; to help students cope, she modi®ed

her approach and engaged in practices which did not re¯ect her principles.

Woods, 1996 Teachers' interpretations of classroom events were powerfully in¯uenced

by their beliefs, assumptions and knowledge about L2 teaching and learning.

24 S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31

Language Teacher' in a section entitled `Teachers' Knowledge of Grammar'), thisstudy merely provides further evidence of how limited our understanding ofteachers' practices and cognitions in L2 grammar teaching currently is.

5. A new perspective

A recent project illustrates the new perspective on research on L2 grammarteaching which I am arguing for here (Borg, 1998a,b; 1999b). This work departsfrom existing studies of formal instruction in three ways:

1. It acknowledges the centrality of both grammar in L2 teaching and of teachercognition in the study of instruction.

2. It focuses on what teachers in real3 classrooms do in teaching grammar andexamines the thinking underlying these observed practices.

3. It presents extensive samples of primary data which portray formal instructionand capture teachers' commentaries on their work.

This project is thus descriptive and interpretive in scope. That is, it considers whatteachers actually do in teaching grammar and explores the cognitive bases of theseactions. This research perspective allows us to develop a more complete con-ceptualisation of L2 grammar teaching than we currently possess. To illustrate thispoint, here are some examples of the ®ndings which have emerged from my work.

1. It is clear that grammar teaching is a truly multi-faceted decision-making pro-cess. In discussing their practices in teaching grammar, the teachers I haveworked with revealed that, tacitly or overtly, they made decisions about. whether to conduct formal instruction at all,. what language points to focus on,. how to structure grammar lessons,. how to present and/or analyse grammar,. how metalinguistically explicit to be,. what kind of grammar practice activities to utilise,. how to deal with students' grammatical errors.

2. Grammar teaching is thus not a monolithic enterprise; rather, it is de®ned byteachers' interacting decisions about a range of issues, each of which con-stitutes a focus for further research in its own right (e.g. Borg (1999b) I focussolely on the issue of teachers' practices and cognitions regarding metalinguis-tic explicitness).

3. Pedagogical dichotomies (e.g. inductive vs. deductive) implied in existingresearch on grammar teaching become blurred in practice. That is, teachers

3By real I mean that teachers were studied in the course of their routine duties. Of course, I am aware

of the observer's paradox (Labov, 1972)Ðthe inevitable e�ect with the presence of the observer, no matter

how unobtrusive this is, will have on the phenomenon under observation. In this sense, no observed

phenomenon is wholly `real'.

S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31 25

alternate between or blend these traditionally exclusive strategies depending onspeci®c instructional factors. For example, one teacher I worked with felt thatinductive learning was more appropriate but believed that students resented alack of teacher-directed grammar work; hence, she did occasionally conductmini-lectures on grammar points such as the syntax of multi-word verbs.Another teacher also preferred to encourage students to discover things forthemselves, yet he had no objection to explaining grammar when he felt stu-dents were unable to reach useful conclusions on their own. Super®cially, thepedagogical variability exhibited by these teachers might be interpreted asmethodological inconsistency, but insight into the teachers' cognitions enablesus to make sense of their behaviours.

4. Teachers' decisions in teaching grammar were in¯uenced by their often-con¯icting cognitions about language, learning in general, L2 learning, gram-mar teaching, students, and self. Thus grammar teaching often re¯ected theresolution of con¯icts among competing cognitions held by the teachers. Forexample, one teacher believed it was important for students to learn grammar,yet he taught grammar very rarely because of his self-perceptionÐhe wasinsecure in his own knowledge about grammar and was afraid he would becaught out by students' questions. Another teacher taught grammar regularlydespite his belief that it did little to promote students' acquisition of the lan-guage. He did so because he believed it was important to address students'expectations that their course would involve attention to grammar. Onceagain, it is only by studying teacher cognition that we can gain access to theseoften hidden motivations for teachers' instructional decisions.

5. The cognitions underlying formal instruction were generated by key educa-tional and professional experiences in the teachers' lives. Three categories ofexperience were particularly in¯uential:. Schooling, particularly teachers' language education. For example, a teacher

who had learnt foreign languages successfully through grammar-translationmethods was willing to incorporate elements of such methods into his gen-erally communicative approach to L2 teaching. Another teacher minimisedthe use of grammatical terminology in her work because her metalinguisti-cally rich experience of L2 learning had not enabled her to become a com-petent speaker of the language she studied.

. Teacher education also had a powerful in¯uence on the development ofteachers' cognitions in grammar teaching. The teachers I worked with hadall experienced L2 teacher education programmes which encouraged themto adopt a communicative, meaning-oriented, and student-centredapproach to L2 instruction. One lasting outcome of these programmes, forexample, was that the teachers shared the view that it was wrong to inter-rupt students to correct their grammatical errors during oral ¯uency work.However, not all the principles instilled by teacher education programmeshad an enduring e�ect on the teachers (see next point).

. Classroom experience also had a strong e�ect on teacher cognition ingrammar teaching. For example, one teacher who had been originally

26 S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31

trained to avoid explicit talk about grammar had come to understand thatstudents often wanted and felt comfortable with such information; hence hehad changed his views on this issue. This is but one example of the way inwhich the cognitions and practices in teaching grammar held by teachersearly in their careers were often modi®ed, intuitively or through consciousre¯ection, on the basis of subsequent classroom experience.

These ®ndings are but preliminary insights into the nature of formal instruction,yet they do illustrate the potential which the study of teacher cognition has forextending our current understandings of L2 grammar teaching. Such work alsoleads to the development of more focused research questions for the study of gram-mar teaching. Thus, at the start of my project, I was guided by general questionssuch as `how do teachers teach grammar?' However, by studying what teachers doand exploring the kinds of instructional decisions which grammar teaching involves,I have formulated a set of speci®c questions which can provide the basis for con-tinuing research on grammar teaching. These questions are presented in Table 5.

Table 5

A descriptive and interpretive perspective on L2 grammar teaching

These questions are initially descriptive. The interpretive perspective is obtained when

we ask teachers to make explicit the rationale for the practices described through these

questions. (e.g. Why do they sequence grammar activities in a particular way? What

factors in¯uence the way they handle students' errors?).

Content

* How much time do teachers dedicate to grammar teaching?

* What language points do teachers focus on in grammar work? How are these chosen?

Materials

*What are the sources of the grammar materials teachers use?

Lesson Structure

*Do teachers sequence grammar teaching activities in any particular way(s)?

*Within the context of a whole lesson, at what stage(s) does grammar work occur?

Strategies

*To what extent do teachers explain grammar? How?

*Do teachers encourage students to discover things for themselves? How?

*Do teachers encourage students to become aware of grammar rules? How?

*Do teachers promote the use of grammatical terminology in teaching grammar?

*Do teachers provide students with opportunities to use grammar? How?

Outcomes

*Do teachers check if students have understood and `learnt' the grammar under study? How?

Questions About Grammar

*What kinds of questions about grammar do teachers ask the students?

*How do teachers respond to students' answers to these questions?

*Do teachers encourage students to ask questions about grammar?

*How do teachers respond to such questions?

Grammar Errors

*How do teachers deal with students' spoken and written grammatical errors during accuracy

and ¯uency work?

S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31 27

In addition, research on teacher cognition provides data which can serve as thebasis of more e�ective teacher education and development initiatives. Currently, L2teacher educators can, at best, introduce trainees to instructional strategies forteaching grammar without being able to illustrate how and why (and `if ', I wouldadd) L2 teachers in real classrooms utilise these strategies. Teacher cognitionresearch addresses this problem by providing L2 teacher educators with detailed,authentic accounts of teacher thinking and action in formal instruction. The analysisand discussion of such accounts can enhance the development of re¯ective skills inteachers in training (Richert, 1991) and also stimulate practising teachers to evaluatethe bases of their current practices4 (see Borg, 1998b, for a practical example of howresearch on teacher cognition in grammer teaching can be used to promote L2 tea-cher development).In conclusion, a comment on the evaluation of teacher cognition is also war-

ranted. Given that we lack indisputable knowledge about e�ective L2 grammarteaching and learning, the evaluation of teacher cognition does not involve decidingwhich cognitions are `right' (i.e. which promote learning) and which are `wrong'.Rather, in my work so far, teachers' cognitions have been evaluated with referenceto several alternative criteria: (1) the clarity of the reasons teachers give for theirinstructional decisions; (2) the consistency of teachers' positions (e.g. the congruenceamong their cognitions and practices or the internal consistency among cognitionsthemselves); (3) teachers' ability to cite evidence (e.g. classroom data, professionalliterature) to support their cognitions; (4) teachers' awareness of the factors whichhave led to the development of these cognitions; and (5) teachers' willingness toconsider alternatives to the grammar teaching practices and cognitions which theycurrently embrace (see Borg, 1999a, for a more detailed discussion). This evaluativeprocess equates quality teaching with teachers' ability to re¯ect on their practicesand cognitions in formal instruction, to seek concrete support for the e�cacy ofthese (such support may include evidence of student learning), and to clarify and/ormodify them where they are found to be vague and/or unwarranted. In future, as wecontinue to learn more about what teachers do and think in teaching grammar,studies which investigate students' perspectives on these actions and thoughts willalso be needed. Such work may ultimately shed light on the relationships betweenteacher cognition and student learning in L2 grammar teaching.

6. Conclusion

The essence of my argument here is that the study of L2 grammar teaching shouldre¯ect the trends evident in mainstream educational research by awarding moreattention to the role of teacher cognition. Teacher cognition research extends ourcurrent understandings of formal instruction by shedding light not only on what

4The power of these accounts is captured in the reaction of one reader to Borg (1998a) ``although I

myself do not teach grammer, the detailed description of his [the teacher in the study] thoughts/actions did

inspire me to reconsider some of my own teaching practices'' (personal communications).

28 S. Borg / System 27 (1999) 19±31

teachers do, but also by providing insight into the cognitive bases of these practices.Such data can play a central role in L2 teacher education and development initia-tives which stimulate teachers to re¯ect on and hence to improve the quality of theirown grammar teaching practices.

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