The Grammatical Awareness of Student Teachers: The Case of an English Education Study Program in Indonesia

The aims of this study were to find out student teachers’ grammatical awareness and their perception towards grammatical awareness. This study employed a mixed method research. The participants were 129 English Education Study Program’s student teachers at one state Islamic University in Indonesia. Purposeful sampling technique was applied to choose the participants. To collect the quantitative data, grammatical test was used and interview was used to obtain qualitative data. 129 student teachers took the test and 12 of them were willing to participate in the interview. The results indicated that student teachers had four types of grammatical awareness, namely (1) metalanguage recognition, (2) metalanguage production, (3) identification and grammatical error correction, and (4) grammatical rules explanation. The student teachers lacked of grammatical awareness. It could be seen from their ability to explain grammatical mistakes. Rules in grammar and explanation tasks were the most difficult for them whereas the easiest one was a metalanguage recognition task. The major factor of their weakness was the complexity of the rules of tenses.