First-year student teachers’ knowledge of L1 grammar

Abstract

Despite protracted concerns about Norwegian students’ decline in grammatical knowledge, the issue is poorly researched empirically. Aiming to describe the level of Norwegian students’ grammatical knowledge in more detail, this article presents the results from a grammar survey distributed to first-year student teachers (N=235). The following research question has guided the study: What characterises Norwegian student teachers’ grammatical knowledge as they enter teacher education?

The results clearly show that the student teachers’ grammatical knowledge is quite poor. The students know the word classes verb, noun, adjective and pronoun, as well as the sentence constituent subject. Their knowledge is founded on semantics, while structural features of language seem to be a blind spot. The study contributes to the international research on grammatical subject knowledge (an important part of Knowledge of Language [KaL]). The paper will also fill a research gap on Norwegian student teachers’ grammatical knowledge. Moreover, this article will be the first to report student teachers' grammatical knowledge from a context with two written standards, as we have in Norway.