Teaching that promotes multilingual students' grammatical awareness

Abstract

Through sentence chain tests before and after interventions with teaching about systemic-functional grammar (see Halliday 2014) in grade 3 at a linguistically heterogeneous school in Sweden, we have studied whether the ability to determine what is a sentence increases when students receive grammar instruction with the support of a concretizing model of a sentence.

The study is based on research that questions traditional grammar teaching as support for writing (Andrews 2005, Torgerson et al. 2014) but which shows that teaching systemic-functional grammar provides good support for language and knowledge developmentn( e.g. Moore & Schleppegrell 2016). The project also follows up a pilot study on how grammar teaching can be made concrete by comparing the parts of sentences with planets that rotate around suns (Lindgren 2022).

The theory behind the study is based on a systemic-functional theory of language (Halliday 2014). The material consists of results of sentence chain tests (see Jacobsson 2014) in three experimental classes and three control classes.

Preliminary data from the analyzes of the student tests show an increase measured in points after the interventions. The increase was large for both the control group (eta2=0.45) and the experimental group (eta2=0.63). However, the magnitude of the increase was greater for the experimental group than for the control group, which we interpret as more increasement of the experimental group's than of the control group’s performance.