Investigating pre-service teachers’ acceptance of Cognitive Grammar as a viable innovation: A case study

Definitive claims are hard to come by in SLA research. Yet researchers working within the Applied Cognitive Linguistics framework have made a case for the facilitative effect of a cognitive-pedagogical approach to language teaching (see e.g. Cadierno and Eskildsen 2015; Evers-Vermeulen and Tribushinina 2018; Tyler et al. 2018). However robust, these findings overlook a key variable in the language teaching equation: teacher beliefs. SLA research focusing on grammar has a propensity to envisage teaching from a researcher’s perspective (Borg, 2003), thereby denying that “teachers possess access to unique knowledge about teaching” (Freeman, 2002, p. 8) that affects their pedagogical decision-making, instructional practices, professional development (Borg, 1999, 2003, 2006, 2015, 2019) and, last but not least, acceptance or rejection of innovation (Kennedy, 1987). This is all the more true with pre-service teachers (Cheng et al., 2009). This presentation contends that deep-rooted pre-service teachers’ beliefs about grammar and grammar teaching exist, and that understanding these beliefs is a prerequisite to any attempt at implementing findings from SLA research.

The article focuses on an innovative approach to the COUNT/MASS distinction (CMD) in English inspired by Cognitive Grammar (CG). More specifically, the pertinence of the innovation is put to the test of a group of pre-service language teachers that have received no formal training on grammar teaching and whose teaching thus rests on established beliefs. The experiment was carried out at the Haute École Louvain en Hainaut (HELHa), a teacher training university college in Belgium. The participants (n=12) first had to fill out a questionnaire whose purpose was to elicit their ‘reported beliefs’ on grammar and grammar teaching. They were then taught a lesson on the CMD that introduced the concept of boundedness which underlie this aspect of the language (Niemeier, 2008). The point was to offer a fully fleshed lesson similar to what the participants will be required to do as soon as they graduate. The participants were asked to participate in a follow-up focus group discussion in which Davis’ Technology Acceptance Model (1986) was used as a roadmap for the questioning route. The data confirmed that CG is perceived as a useful addition to traditional rules when it is used in real-life conditions, i.e., within the context of a lesson plan that follows official guidelines. Interestingly, the participants spontaneously pointed to a paradox in our lesson plan that is also typical of most available cognitive-pedagogical suggestions (Wirag, personal communication): replacing rules by other rules, however cognitively pertinent, may not tap into the full potential of CG. The paper concludes that further investigation into a more embodied approach to grammar is necessary. In a follow-up quasi-experimental study involving secondary school learners, we intend to have test subjects experiment with real-life objects and materials that prototypically illustrate the CMD.