Aspects of school grammar in Norway
Thursday, May 4
4-5 p.m.
Bond Hall 415 or Zoom
A talk by visiting scholar Dr. Mari Nygård
In this talk, Nygård presents core points from three different projects which all revolve around aspects of implicit and explicit grammatical competence among students. The first one, Norwegian teacher students’ knowledge about and conceptions of grammar, is about students’ beliefs about and level of grammar knowledge when they enter university. The second one, Syntactic competence in early writing, is a sub-study under the project FUS (Functional Writing in Primary school). It aims to map out which syntactic features appear in young students’ texts and what these features can reveal about syntactic competence as a concept. The third one is called Inquiry-based language teaching. It is a collaboration between linguists and teachers and aims to design and implement language teaching that builds on the students’ own linguistic intuitions in order to strengthen their linguistic awareness and knowledge.
Mari Nygård is an associate professor of L1 Norwegian, based at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, where she works in the Department of Teacher Education. She holds a PhD from 2013 in theoretical syntax, about discourse ellipsis in spoken Norwegian, and has also worked on gender assignment. Her current research focusses on different aspects of grammar in school, such as grammar teaching and grammatical competence among students, for both first and second language learners.