Given your comfort with teaching, which strategy would you be more inclined to use to present grammar? How could you encourage yourself to be more comfortable with the other strategy?
When grammar is taught deductively, the teacher:
- Explains the rule clearly to the students
- Does not necessarily provide content or communicative function for the grammar
- Focuses on the form and then the meaning
- Creates drills and repetition for students to learn the desired structure
- Takes all responsibility for students’ learning
- Presents students with many examples of the target language
- Helps the learner to induce the rule
- Provides students with a context for the language and a purpose for its use
- Focuses on the meaning and then the form
- Provides opportunities for meaningful communication through which students can discover the rule
- Empowers the students to problem-solve
Although I may have had extensive experience in the classroom, I must admit I have not had extensive experience teaching grammar. As I read over the disadvantages and advantages of inductive and deductive approaches as put forward by Thornbury, it seems that a less-experienced educator would probably feel most comfortable using a deductive approach. This may be true for several reasons. First, it is a straight-forward approach that gets straight to the point of explanation of a rule. It allows the teacher some freedom to deal with grammar points as they arise, rather than anticipating them in advance. It also can be quick and provide time for lots of practice. It seems that not having significant experience with the teaching of grammar structures, I would probably feel more secure in this traditional, succinct approach.
On the other hand, the benefits for the learners in the inductive approach appear to be exceptional. When teachers challenge learners to infer the rules of form and usage from a group of carefully chosen examples, they invite them to spend mental energy recognizing and hypothesizing rules. This cognitive effort may make the rules more memorable and encourages learners to depend on themselves. Such benefits can be reaped in the event that educators have spent significant effort preparing relevant, meaningful examples and / or situations. This approach seems to be more taxing on educators in a variety of ways even though it provides specific benefits to learners.
I believe that in order to feel more comfortable with an inductive approach, I will need to feel more confident in general as a teacher of grammar. I will need to better familiarize myself with language rules, structures and forms, their intricate interplays and exceptions. I will need to build a better repertoire of grammar-teaching resources, including textbooks, and the use of software like corpora or concordancing programming.
As we have been discussing, it is probably most beneficial for learners to be exposed to both approaches so that they are given communicative contexts within which to practice communication at the same time they are guided with identification and reproduction of particular patterns and structures. It seems to be a delicate balance that challenges teachers to develop skills in both inductive and deductive strategies.
