English metalanguage awareness among primary school teachers in Hong Kong
With the introduction of the English Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers in Hong Kong, local English teachers’ performance in the assessment has been in the spotlight. Among the five papers in the assessment, teachers’ scores for the writing paper, a composite of two tasks¾expository wri...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
Pusat Pengajian Bahasa dan Linguistik.FSSK,UKM
2011
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| Online Access: | http://journalarticle.ukm.my/964/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/964/ http://journalarticle.ukm.my/964/1/pp1_16.pdf |
| Summary: | With the introduction of the English Language Proficiency Assessment for Teachers in
Hong Kong, local English teachers’ performance in the assessment has been in the
spotlight. Among the five papers in the assessment, teachers’ scores for the writing paper,
a composite of two tasks¾expository writing and error correction and explanation, have
consistently recorded the lowest since the implementation. One recurrent comment is
teachers’ insufficient understanding and use of metalinguistic terminology. It is against
this background that the present study was conducted. It aimed to explore the extent to
which local English teachers in primary schools were aware of English metalinguistic
terms at different structural levels. 20 in-service primary English teachers participated in
an English grammar metalanguage test, modelled on Andrews (1999), and their
performance revealed three key patterns: (1) the lowest mean score in the explanation
component, (2) recognition of examples of grammatical functions being much harder
than that of grammatical forms, and (3) errors at the word level being more readily to be
corrected and explained than those at the phrasal and clausal levels. Their performance
also suggested one possible discrepancy between primary English teachers and the
secondary counterparts, where the primary teachers were better at the lower level of
metalanguage application (e.g., recognition of examples for metalinguistic terms) and the
secondary teachers at higher-level applications (e.g., error correction). The paper
concludes with a suggestion that systematic micro-metalinguistic input be integrated in
teacher training courses and be used more actively among in-service teachers in their
teaching context. |
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