Teaching English Grammar at the Tertiary Level The Case of First-year EFL Students at Belhadj Bouchaib University Centre of Ain Témouchent

Abstract

Grammar instruction plays an important role in the field of language pedagogy, because teaching and learning grammar effectively result in promoting the learner’s language accuracy and proficiency. First-year EFL students spent a long period in learning the prerequisite grammatical knowledge to master the target language, however, they usually fail to use this knowledge in meaningful communication. This study tries to identify the factors that prevent first-year EFL students, in the department of English at Belhadj Bouchaib University Centre of Ain Témouchent, to use their grammatical knowledge accurately, meaningfully and appropriately when communicating. The participants of this investigation were 70 first-year EFL students and 06 English teachers from the department of English. With the aim of achieving triangulation, both quantitative and qualitative methodologies were used in the analysis of the data, collected through three research instruments, namely student’s questionnaire, teacher’s interview, and classroom observation. The results indicated that the traditional approaches in teaching grammar that have been proven to be ineffective continued to dominate the grammar pedagogy in the department of English. This situation, in addition to the negative attitude that first-year EFL students hold towards grammar, could affect the student’s ability to successfully use their grammatical background. Moreover, it was found that teachers had to cope with a lot of difficulties, such as time constraints, overloaded syllabus, and student’s learnability problem, which are considered as additional factors influencing the process of teaching and learning grammar .