En del i helheten : En studie av kontextualiserad grammatikundervisning i gymnasieskolan

Sammanfattning: The aim of this thesis is to contribute with knowledge about grammar teaching in L1 education through a design-based research project where a researcher and teachers create, implement, and evaluate contextualized grammar teaching in Swedish upper secondary school. The aim is also to illuminate how it can be used and understood. Shulman’s (1986; 1987) theory on pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and the process of transformation is used as a theoretical framework in the thesis frame. The thesis includes four articles that investigate different perspectives of the educational design. The empirical data used consist of peer-reviewed articles, audio-recorded focus group discussions with the six participating teachers, video recordings of the students’ metalinguistics activities, field notes by the researcher, and a student questionnaire. The results show how contextualized grammar teaching, with the goal of developing students’ meta­linguistic understanding, can be implemented and used through a set of interacting design elements, namely inductive tasks, discussions, visualizations, and integra­tion. Furthermore, the results illuminate different strategies that students use when analyzing syntactical components in a literary text and their pedagogical (dis)advantages. The thesis further shows that using authentic texts when teaching grammar encourages students to discover the interrelationships between different levels of language, such as grammar and pragmatics. However, using authentic texts can also hinder students from discovering grammatical structures and, by extension, the hierarchical structure of language, due to the complexity that characterizes them. Based on the overall findings, the importance and complexity of the contextualization of grammar and its relation to traditional grammar teaching from a theoretical and practical perspective is discussed. In the light of teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge and the conditions of practice, the results indicate the need to recapitulate what grammar teaching is and can be within the framework of L1 education in general and the Swedish subject in particular.