In our first session for 2022, we have revisited the topic of our very first CIRCLE module, Grammar Teaching—when? why? how? The question of whether and how language-focused teaching is useful to develop both explicit language knowledge and implicit language knowledge is central to language teaching. We invited two experienced language teachers at upper secondary schools in Sweden to join us in a video conversation: Rusalina Ehnvall from Birgittaskolan in Linköping who teaches English, and Ewa-Katharina Baedecke from Hersbyskolan in Lidingö who teaches Swedish and German.
The interview is in Swedish, and the video is subtitled in Swedish. We have prepared a transcript in English for those who don’t understand Swedish.
You might like to organise your own live conversation with your colleagues about grammar teaching as part of the Language-focused teaching strand in Paul Nation’s Four Strands model. You could discuss some of the topics taken up by Ewa Baedecke and Rusalina Ehnvall in the video above:
- whether translation activities might serve a purpose in language-focused learning;
- working with language-focused learning in linguistically diverse classes;
- whether it would be helpful to have more guidance on what structures and vocabulary to cover in different language courses;
- the role for language learning of grammatical awareness in the learners’ first language.