First-year student teachers’ knowledge of L1 grammar

Abstract

Despite protracted concerns about Norwegian students’ decline in grammar knowledge, the issue is poorly researched empirically. This article presents and the results from a grammar survey distributed to first-year student teachers (N=235). Our aim is to provide an empirical analysis of the level of Norwegian students’ grammar knowledge as they enter teacher education. We seek to answer the following research questions: RQ1: What characterizes the knowledge of grammar of Norwegian student teachers as they enter teacher education? RQ2: Are there grammatical topics and structures that they master more or less? If so, what characterizes these topics?   The results show that the grammar knowledge of student teachers, is rather poor. The students know the word classes verb, noun, adjective and pronoun, as well as the SC subject. Their knowledge is founded on semantics, while the structural features of language seem to be a blind spot. The study contributes to the international research on Knowledge of Language (KaL) from a Norwegian perspective. Due to the two written standards of Norwegian, our study will be the first to report student teachers’ grammar knowledge from such a context.