Centre for Research in Language and Literacy: Research in Writing Event

Centre for Research in Language and Literacy: Research in Writing Event

All staff and PGR students are warmly invited to attend a seminar and discussion with visitor Associate Professor Mari Nygard of NTNU. Mari will be talking about her current and recent projects for about 45 minutes, then we hope to generate some lively discussion about how her research interests interleave with those of staff and students at Exeter! Further details are below:

Aspects of grammar didactics

I am an associate professor of L1 Norwegian, based in NTNU, Trondheim, Department of Teacher Education. I hold a PhD from 2013 in syntax, about discourse ellipsis in spoken Norwegian. After that, my research has focussed on didactic aspects of grammar, such as grammar teaching and grammatical competence among students, for both first and second language learners. In this talk, I will present core points from three different projects that I have been and am currently involved in.

The first one, Norwegian teacher students’ knowledge and conceptions about grammar, is about first year students’ beliefs about and level of grammar knowledge when they enter university. It also addresses how the students understand and misunderstand terminology and central concepts within descriptive grammar. 

The second project is a sub-study under the larger project FUS (Functional Writing in Primary school). It aims to describe syntactic competence among early writers by asking which syntactic features appear in a selection of young students’ texts (about 570), and what these features can reveal about different aspects of students' syntactic competence.

The third one is a recent project called Inquiry-based language teaching, in which we collaborate with teachers in upper secondary school in designing and implementing teaching methods that build on the students’ own intuitions about language to increase their linguistic awareness as well as their level of knowledge about language.