| The present study investigated the effects of deductive and inductive approaches on Japanese learners' pragmatic competence. Sixty adult intermediate proficiency native speakers of Japanese were randomly assigned to one of four groups consisting of three treatment groups and one control group. Each treatment group received one of the following kinds of instruction: (a) deductive instruction; (b) inductive instruction with structured input tasks; or (c) inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks. Both deductive and inductive instructions are on a continuum of explicitness that ranges from more explicit to less explicit. The instruction was conducted for 40 minutes twice a week for two weeks. The purpose of this instruction was to establish knowledge about lexical/phrasal downgraders and syntactic downgraders in English for performing complex requests. The control group, which was included in order to provide baseline data, did not receive any instruction about the target structures, but instead completed competed reading comprehension exercises to prepare for the Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC). All participants took a pre-test, a post-test approximately one week after the four lessons, and a follow-up test approximately four weeks after the four lessons. Each test was made up of two receptive judgment tasks and two production tasks. The results of the two-way repeated-measures ANOVAs indicated that the three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group (p < .006). However, on the target items in the unplanned listening judgment test, although the participants in the inductive instruction groups maintained the positive effects of the treatment, between the post-test and the follow-up test, the participants in the deductive instruction group did not. This result demonstrated that these learners remembered better when they had to discover underlying rules themselves rather than when they were simply told about the rules explicitly. In other words, explicit instruction was effective when it was conducted inductively rather than deductively. The results also indicated that inductive instruction was effective when combined with form- and meaning-focused tasks. Pedagogical implications, limitations, and areas for future research are discussed. |
