A Comparative Study On The Effectiveness Of Inductive And Deductive Approaches In Senior High School English Complex Grammar Structures Teaching

As one of the basic language knowledge,grammar plays an important role in foreign language teaching and learning.Recent studies showed that explicit instruction was the most effective way when presenting grammar in a foreign language teaching setting.However,they did not distinguish the effectiveness of types of explicit instruction(explicit-inductive vs.explicit-deductive).Besides,Krashen(1992)distinguished between simple and complex structures.Some foreign researchers did some researches into complex grammar structures but domestic researchers did few studies on complex grammar structures and most of the subjects were college students.Therefore,based on previous studies,this paper mainly studies the effectiveness of two types of explicit instruction(explicit-deductive or explicit-inductive)for high school students to learn complex grammar structures.This study selected senior high school students as the experimental subjects and chose the attributive clause as the target grammar,and through the experimental research,the following three research questions were explored.(1)Do explicit-deductive and explicit-inductive instructions have different short-term impacts on the effectiveness for Senior High School students to learn complex grammar structures?(2)Do explicit-deductive and explicit-inductive instructions have different long-term impacts on the effectiveness for Senior High School students to learn complex grammar structures?(3)Does learners' English Proficiency have an impact upon the effectiveness of the inductive or deductive approach for senior high school students to learn complex grammar structures?In order to explore the above three research questions,112 Grade One students of two parallel classes in Qinan No.5 Senior High School were selected as subjects.In teaching attributive clause,one class utilized inductive grammar approach and the other used deductive grammar approach.The learners' mastery of attributive clauses was examined by immediate-post-test and delayed-post-test.The experimental results showed that(1)explicit-deductive approach and explicit-deductive approach had different short-term impacts on the effectiveness for Senior High School students to learn complex grammar structures.Specific speaking,the deductive approach was better for high school students to learn complex grammar structure in short-term;(2)in long term,deductive approach was more effective to the learning of complex grammatical structures;(3)for high level learners,the inductive approach was better in learning complex grammatical structure,while for the middle level and low level learners,deductiveapproach was better.These findings provide the implication for English grammar teaching in Senior High School: teachers should adopt deductive approach in teaching complex grammar structures.