Saturday, 12 May 2012

Course 3 Deductive or Inductive Grammar Instruction

Inductive or deductive, that is the question. Personally, I prefer the inductive approach in learning because I learn better that way if the concept is easy to discern. Inductive learning is a lot more fun, interesting and I remember the concepts introduced by it better since my brain has had to process it. However, if complicated concepts are introduced, I can get frustrated trying to analyze them with an inductive approach. For such instances, I prefer the deductive approach; it saves time.

In terms of teaching with those approaches, I have used both strategies. I generally feel that if the concept is too difficult for me to learn inductively, it will be too difficult for students. I'm the guinea pig. If the inductive approach re: a concept doesn't seem logical to me, I refuse to use it. It seems that creating inductive lessons, unless it's a really simple concept, takes a lot more time than deductive lessons.It's easy to teach that adding an e to the end of a cvc word will make the vowel long by comparing such words or having students pick out hard or soft c and g sounds with lists, but those seem obvious examples where inductive lessons could surface. It's not that easy with other lessons.  

To encourage myself to be more comfortable using the inductive method, I would use a text or coursebook that uses inductive methods to teach concepts. If I could see many examples, I would catch on and be able to utilize the method and apply it to my own lessons. Skeletons, examples, and practice are necessary before internalizing such strategies.

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