Pre-service primary school teachers’ reflections on EFL students’ awareness of grammatical forms in online communication

Abstract

This article involves an empirical study of pre-service primary school teachers’ essays on primary school students’ awareness of grammatical forms of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) in online communication. 10 pre-service primary school teachers (hereafter – participants) were matched with their respective control group of 10 non-teacher students enrolled in the same EFL course at a large university in Norway. The specific aim of the study was to analyse the participants’ reflective essays and to juxtapose them with the essays written by the controls in order to reveal possible differences between the two groups. The participants’ and the respective controls’ reflective essays about primary school students’ awareness of EFL grammatical forms in online communication in English were further analysed by means of a mixed- method design comprised of a quantitative analysis with the computer software program WordSmith (Scott, 2012) and a qualitative framing analysis. The results of data analysis indicate that the frames found in participants’ reflective essays fall within 6 categories, namely “Attention to Grammar”, “Encouragement”, “Individual Differences”, “Informal Language”, “No Attention to Grammar”, and “Subjective Opinion”. These findings are further discussed in the article.