Grammar teaching in ELT: A cross-national comparison of teacher-reported practices

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Today, the Common European Framework of Reference (2009), and with it the action-based approach, underlies English Language Teaching (ELT) curricula throughout Europe. However, actual teaching practices are likely to vary according to factors such as the educational level and supra-national differences, including legal guidelines and the level of extramural English, i.e. out-of-school use of English (Sundqvist, 2009). Those factors presumably influence the role of grammar teaching in foreign language classrooms, which has been the subject of continuous debate (see Graus & Coppen, 2016; Thornbury, 1999; Ur, 2011). Such potential differences in teacher-reported ELT practices across Europe have not yet been investigated in instructed second language acquisition research. Therefore, the present study aims to compare the type of instruction in lower vs. upper secondary school in Sweden, Austria, and France, countries ranking differently in the EF Proficiency index (Education First, 2019). 615 secondary English teachers across the three countries filled in an online questionnaire designed to assess their use of planned vs. incidental form focus, implicit vs. explicit, and inductive vs. deductive instruction (Ellis, 2001a, 2009; Long, 1991). Results seem to indicate that (1) in lower secondary, Swedish teachers teach less explicitly than teachers in Austria and France; (2) Sweden provides ELT that is more implicit-fluency-based than does Austria and France; (3) incidental (rather than planned) grammar teaching is more dominant in upper than in lower secondary across countries and in Sweden and France as compared to Austria; and (4) French teachers differ from the other groups in their application of more inductive rather than deductive instruction. We argue that both the educational level and a country’s language policies and ideologies – and consequently also the extent to which they encourage use and exposure to extramural English – may be determining factors in the type of instruction applied in ELT.