Teaching Grammar Not a Fiasco Anymore: The Exploitation of the Inductive Approach to Teach Grammar in a University Context.

Abstract

This study aimed at drawing a comparison between the effectiveness of employing deductive and inductive approaches in teaching English grammar. Deductive teaching of grammar as dis-crete units has been a common practice in English as a Second Language (L2) classrooms which makes the teaching and learning process exhausting for learners. In contrast, teaching grammar in context is expected to expend a limited amount of time, simultaneously enabling the teacher to encompass a wide range of grammar aspects. A group of 50 students who obtained average (45 – 50) marks for the placement test of the intensive course was selected from the first-year students of the Faculty of Science and divided into two groups each consisting of 25. Both the Control Group (CG), and Experiment Group (EG) were exposed to 10 one-hour-long lessons on tenses and modal verbs, providing instructions using lesson materials based on the deductive ap-proach and inductive approach respectively. Before and after the intervention of each approach, a written communicative exercise based on grammar taught for the EG and CG, in which they had to fill in twenty blanks of a letter was administered. Besides, a focused group interview was conducted using a semi-structured questionnaire with 20 students, randomly selecting 10 from each group. The students’ performance was quantitatively analysed while their percep-tions were qualitatively analysed to discern the efficacy of the two approaches. Based on their marks it was revealed that inductive teaching of grammar is indispensable for exploiting the language meaningfully in authentic situations. Moreover, the perceptions of the students have displayed a clear preference to learning grammar in context over the discrete point teaching of grammar. However, the productivity of this approach is determined by the teaching strategies employed by the teachers and the appropriate selection of lesson materials related to contexts.