چکیده:
A teacher's language awareness (TLA) is generally believed to exert a tremendous influence on language instruction. However, reviewing literature revealed that it has not received due attention in teacher training centers in Iran. Therefore, this paper reports on an investigation into the metalinguistic awareness of prospective teachers at Teacher Education Universities of Iran training to be junior and senior high school English teachers. The study focuses on the test performance of these prospective teachers as an indication of their explicit knowledge base and also the relationship between the metalinguistic knowledge and their error identification capability. To that end, a metalinguistic knowledge test (MKT) and a grammaticality judgment test (GJT) were administered to 207 student teachers to canvass the nature and extent of their repertoire of explicit knowledge about language and of grammatical terminologies as part of their TLA. The results revealed a moderate level of metalinguistic knowledge and a significant relationship between metalinguistic knowledge and error identification ability. Moreover, the findings of the study shed light on the prominence of metalinguistic knowledge as a means of improving teachers' linguistic proficiency, detected the lacunae in student teachers' knowledge about language and signaled the need for improvement in prospective teachers' metalinguistic knowledge.
خلاصه ماشینی:
Studies carried out in the 1980s and 1990s revealed that learners undertaking teacher education programmes were mostly from a 'post traditional grammar' period and, as a result of this, had a less than confident mastery of knowledge about language and possessed meager language awareness (Chandler, Robinson, & Noyes, 1988; Williamson & Hardman, 1995; Wray, 1993).
In a similar vein, the literature on TLA suggests that not all teachers possess sufficient metalinguistic knowledge to explain grammatical rules or to utilize the efficiency of varied options within form-focused instruction approaches (Andrews, 1999a, 2003; Bolitho, 1988; Ellis, 2008; Mitchell, 2000; Wright, 1991; Wright & Bolitho, 1997).
Consequently, giventhe significance of TLA as an essential component of teacher professionalism (Shulman, 1999) as well as a subcomponent of the second language (L2) teachers' pedagogical content knowledge (Andrews, 2001, 2003), this study explored the Iranian prospective English teachers' metalinguistic awareness and their understandings of explicit knowledge about language.
What level of metalinguistic awareness in terms of explicit knowledge of grammar and grammatical terminology do Iranian prospective EFL teachers possess?
1 Participants The participants were 207 students (91 male & 116 female) selected from among an original pool of 311 male and female undergraduate trainee teachers majoring in teaching English as a foreign language (TEFL) at Teacher Education Universities of Iran in 2016.
4. Discussion This study intended to scrutinize the prospective English teachers' metalinguistic awareness and their understandings of explicit knowledge about language.