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Inductive and Deductive.

First a quick definition: Inductive is known as a 'bottom up' approach. In other words, students discovering grammar rules while working through exercises. For example: A reading comprehension which includes a number of sentences describing what a person has done up to that period in time. After doing the reading comprehension, the teacher could begin to ask questions such as: How long has he done this or that? Has he ever been to Paris? etc. and then follow with When did he go to Paris? To help the students inductively understand the difference between the simple past and the present perfect, these questions could be followed with which questions spoke about a definite time in the past? Which questions asked about the person's general experience? Deductive is known as a 'top down' approach. This is the standard teaching approach that has a teacher explaining rules to the students. For example: The present perfect is made up of the auxiliary verb 'have' plus the past participle. It is used to express an action which has begun in the past and continues into the present moment... etc. I personally feel that a teacher needs in the first place to facilitate learning. That is why I prefer to provide students with inductive learning exercises. However, there are certainly moments when the teacher needs to explain grammar concepts to the class. Generally, I recommend the following class structure when teaching grammar skills:

• Begin with an exercise, game, listening, etc. that introduces the grammar concept.

• Ask students questions that will help them identify the grammar concept to be discussed.

• Follow with another exercise that more specifically focuses on the grammar concept, but takes an inductive approach. This could be a reading exercise with questions and responses in the structure that is being taught.

• Check responses, ask students to explain the grammar concept that has been introduced.

• At this point introduce teaching explanations as a way of clearing up misunderstandings.

• Provide an exercise which focuses on the correct construction of the grammar point. This could be an exercise such as a fill the gap, cloze or tense conjugation activity.

• Ask students to once again explain the concept.

As you can see, the teacher is facilitating students to do their own learning rather than using the 'top down' approach of dictating rules to the class.

The above-mentioned criteria for creditable PG rules are particularly relevant to deductive (rule-driven, top-down) teaching, which leads from an explicit presentation of metalinguistic information, the provision of a set of abstractions, isolated language rules at autonomous levels of description subsequently accompanied by model sentences, to their application to concrete L₂ representations and practice tasks only after the clarification has been studied and digested (Komorowska 1993:120). This technique simply means providing learners with the ready grammar rule, describing en détail how the new structure is formed, what its components are, and in what type of context it can be used. All the information is given in the form of a mini-lecture, during which the teacher usually employs grammatical terminology. After the explanation, the learners are provided with examples illustrating the new structure, which they analyse, and are subsequently asked to apply the rule to new sentences. They are typically expected to memorise the rule (and relevant ‘exceptions’). This form of teaching offers a clear clarification of new language items, which makes the learning task easier and less intimidating and is time-effective, leaving more time for practising the new structures. Among other advantages,

It gets straight to the point, and therefore can be time-saving. It respects the intelligence and maturity of many – especially adult – students and acknowledges the role of cognitive processes in language acquisition. … It confirms many students’ expectations about classroom learning. (Thornbury 1999:30)

This type of teaching is prevalent in the majority of traditional educational institutions.^[1]

The teacher may, however, also go for inductive (Socratic, rule-discovery, bottom-up) teaching, rejecting the idea of giving the learners a ready-made rule. Rather than explicitly telling them off the bat what the rule is, s/he may supply them with carefully selected intelligible linguistic data in context, usually in the form of a text illustrating the use of the particular grammatical structure. The learners’ mission in this guided discovery technique with properly devised questions is to try, on the basis of the model, to arrive at some generalisation that accounts for the underlying regularities in the data and to formulate their own explanation of the rules governing the material presented. The elicited students’ rules will then, if necessary, be amended and corrected by the teacher, and the language structure practised.^[2] Following Stern (1992:150), we can represent the deductive and inductive sequences schematically in the following way:^[3]

deductive approach:                      General rule → Specific examples → Practice