Grammar coming alive: Swedish L1 teachers’ reflections on using authentic texts when teaching grammar

Abstract

As teachers’ experiences are a prerequisite for developing an understanding of the challenges of teaching, their reflections on the potential of using authentic text in L1 grammar teaching deserves closer attention. This paper presents a focus-group study with six Swedish L1 teachers at upper secondary level during an intervention, in which they adopted contextualized grammar teaching in their classrooms. The results show that, according to the teachers, using authentic texts can create connections between grammar and language in use, which motivates the students to learn grammar. However, due to the complexity that characterizes authentic texts they also seem to complicate the instruction of a grammatical phenomenon. The conclusion of the study is that if the teachers have something to connect the grammatical content to, both manipulated and non-manipulated linguistic materials remain relevant in making a grammatical phenomenon comprehensible to the students.