Grammatisk kompetens och kommunikativ språkundervisning : Spansklärares värderingar, dilemman och förslag

Sammanfattning: The thesis aims to describe teachers’ opinions about the role grammatical com-petence plays in communicative language teaching. Since the breakthroughs of the Sixties in functional, meaningful and communicative foreign language teaching, instruction of grammatical structures has changed. In addition, the Swedish national syllabus offers poor descriptions of possible models for pedagogy of grammar; as a consequence, it is likely that the importance of grammatical competence varies in Swedish foreign language classrooms. Subject matter didactic theories (Pedagogical Content Knowledge) combined with Teacher Thinking research, form the theoreti-cal framework. Thirteen Spanish teachers were interviewed about their instructional values, dilemmas and ideas. The patterns that were found indicate that all teachers emphasize the importance of the grammatical structures for language learning and a communicative goal for the courses. Most of the informants practiced or strived for a focus on form approach. The how, what and when questions concerning the role of the grammar were for some teachers important to discuss and a tighter connection to research is suggested to develop and deepen teachers’ practice. Most of the teachers interviewed emphasized subject matter didactics instead of a more general didactic view when it came to the design of their lessons when teaching grammar. It was found that teachers mainly draw upon their own experiences as pupils, stu-dents and teachers when the role of grammar in learning a language was to be con-cretized in actual lessons. It was further discovered that hardly any influences from teacher education programs or other research results were referred to. These results indicate the need to take into account the professional knowledge and teachers’ questions as a basis for improvements in language teaching more firmly upon peda-gogical content knowledge. The results also raise the question whether shared pro-fessional content knowledge should (or should not) be represented in the national syllabus.