A Comparative Study Of The Effects Of Deductive And Inductive Approaches Applied To English Object Clause Teaching In A Junior Middle School

The deductive approach and the inductive approach are two commonly used grammar teaching approaches in foreign language teaching.However,teachers and researchers haven't reached a consensus on which approach is more effective so far.This study is to compare the effects of the deductive approach and inductive approach on junior middle school students' grammar comprehension and production to find out which is more effective in teaching English object clause.It tries to answer the following two research questions.(1)Which of the two approaches is more effective in junior middle school students' comprehension of English object clause,the deductive approach or the inductive approach?(2)Which of the two approaches is more effective in junior middle school students' production of English object clause,the deductive approach or the inductive approach?The deductive approach refers to the approach in which the grammar rules are explained directly to learners first and then some sentence examples are provided to illustrate the rules.As for the inductive approach,the learners observe some sentence examples that contain a certain grammatical structure first and then the learners discover and conclude the grammar rules by themselves or with the teachers' guidance.The grammar item used in the study is object clause.The research subjects are the students of two parallel classes of Grade 8 from an ordinary junior middle school,which serve as the deductive group and the inductive group respectively.The whole experimental process consists of three stages: pre-experiment,teaching and post-experiment.The pre-experiment stage includes two pre-tests which are to ensure the two groups have similar English proficiency and have similar knowledge about object clause respectively.In the teaching stage,the deductive group is taught with the deductive approach and the inductive group is taught with the inductive approach.Inthe post-experiment stage,an immediate test and a delayed test are included.Twenty multiple choice questions are adopted to test the effects of the students' comprehension of object clause in immediate and delayed tests respectively.Twenty sentence translations are used to test the effects of the students' production of object clause in immediate and delayed tests respectively.The results are found as follows.(1)There is no significant difference between the effects of the two teaching approaches on students' grammar comprehension.(2)There is no significant difference between the effects of the two teaching approaches on students' grammar production.The reasons of the results are that both of the deductive and inductive approaches have their own advantages when used in teaching the target grammar.In deductive group,when the teacher teaches the target rules,students' attention could be directed to the target rules.They can get more understanding through examples followed by practice.In inductive group,students are active and they can get involved in the learning process.