Grammatical Awareness Essay

Introduction

Recently, a news reported that starting 2018, the schools in Malaysia will use imported English textbooks for pre-school students, standard one and two students, and students from form one and two. (MalaysianInsight,2017). This action will be taken as the aspiration of the ministry to make the English education in primary and secondary schools following the Common European Framework of Reference, (CEFR). CEFR was developed by the European Council, with the intention to measure the language skills among learners. The journal article by Munir (2009) seeks to examine the English language teachers’ nature and level of grammatical awareness. This is because of the public concern about the quality of Malaysian English teachers nowadays,

Mohd Sofi Ali in 2002 has demonstrated the insufficient of English language proficiency of English language teachers, as well as Nurazila Abd Aziz, in 2007 where she had carried out a research to identify the grammatical awareness of prospective English language teachers in a teacher training institution. Munif try to take this to another level by doing the research to teachers at primary school. This is because it is quite difficult for any researchers to do research on teacher, especially when it comes to evaluating the teachers’ competency in teaching This however, is a taboo among Malaysian but it should be done to see the problem and commencing

With a total of 71 respondents, where 58 of them are females and 13 are males, it somehow does advocate the ecosystem in common primary school, where majority of the teachers are females. Age wise, Munif said that they are ranged from 26 years old to 44 years old, with majority of them are at between 26-30 years old, a common age of new teachers. Majority of respondent had taught English for more than four years, making the result of this research is quite shocking.

The Theory

In this research, on thing that is intriguing is about Andrew’s (1999) theory of grammatical awareness. Munif stated that Andrew’s grammatical awareness is widely used to measure or identify the explicit knowledge of grammar and grammatical terminology. This theory enables anyone to identify the grammatical awareness of any teachers. It is somehow becoming an epiphany to me that to measure my own reliability in teaching English, this would be the test that I should excel to be reliable. The theory stated that there are four concerns, which are;

1. Ability to recognise metalanguage

2. Ability to produce appropriate metalanguage