A constructivist approach to grammar: teaching teachers to teach aspect

This article demonstrates how a constructivist approach to teacher education helps inexperienced teachers understand the learning and teaching of aspect, a core grammatical concept. By consciously experiencing the process of narration (i.e., how a speaker perceives real or imagined events and then organizes perceptions into a coherent recounting of events), apprentice teachers construct a deeper awareness of the form/meaning aspectual correlations of the target language. More generally, this study argues that a constructivist approach to teacher education facilitates the development of an innovative grammar pedagogy by challenging TAs's traditional beliefs about the nature of grammar.