Grammar and text: an experiment in teacher training

• Autor(a) principal: Cardoso, Adriana
• Data de Publicação: 2015
• Outros Autores: Pereira, Susana, Silva, Encarnação
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10451/33017
• topic: Teacher training; Didactic sequence; Teaching grammar; Text genre

The article describes an experiment in teaching training undertaken in the context of the Masters programme in Teacher Training (for primary school teachers) at the Lisbon College of Education. The training experiment was able to: (i) incorporate language teaching into the broader curriculum; (ii) relate the teaching of texts and the teaching of grammar; (iii) integrate the theoretical and practical dimensions of teacher training. The didactic scheme adopted relies on theoretical assumptions, such as the concept of the integrated curriculum advocated by Beane (2003), the model of didactic sequence developed, amongst others, by Dolz and Schneuwly (1998), and the principles of Socio- Discursive Interactionism established by Bronckart (1985, 1997). This training experiment has proved to be particularly useful for all the participants in the process (teachers of the course; trainee teachers; children in the schools, and the form teachers of the classes where the trainees do their practice). As a result of it, there has been a clear improvement in the quality of the teaching provided by our trainees in the domains of writing and grammar. The main advantages of this approach are that: (i) it structures the teaching of writing and grammar; (ii) it uses projects to socially contextualize writing tasks; (iii) it develops various language skills in an integrated fashion, while at the same time working on different areas of knowledge; (iv) it defines forms of spiral progression.