Acquiring Grammatical Structures by Guided Induction

Abstract

RESEARCHERS ARE NOW CONFIRMING what most foreign language teachers have believed for years: the acquisition of certain grammatical structures can benefit from formal instruction (see Chaudron; Lightbown and Spada; Long; Rutherford and Sharwood Smith for review). Lightbown and Spada categorize this focus-on-form by the teacher as either instructional (the teacher presents a linguistic structure and leads the students in practice exercises) or reactive (the teacher reacts to an apparent difficulty a student is having during a communicative activity) (436). Within the instructional format, controversy still surrounds the issue of what is the most effective approach for presenting a new grammatical pattern in the classroom. Currently, Omaggio and Rivers in their methods books favor an inductive presentation in which students are encouraged to develop rules from authentic linguistic samples and then to practice applying these rules in communicative exercises. Many foreign language teachers and textbooks, however, still adhere to a deductive presentation. In this approach the instructor explains a grammatical rule first and then directs the class in contextualized exercises which practice application of the rule (or, the students may read about the rule in a textbook and complete accompanying exercises to practice application). This approach is deductive in the sense that the grammar lesson progresses from the general (the rule) to particulars (examples in a drill). Although far from definitive, the majority of empirical research comparing inductive and deductive approaches suggests that the deductive approach may be slightly more effective (e.g., Chastain and Woerdehoff; Chastain; Scherer and Wertheimer; Seliger; see Hammerly for a discussion of the controversy). From our point of view, the problem with this research is in the way the inductive approach is conceptualized. In all of the studies cited above the only difference between deductive and inductive approaches was in whether the rule was explicitly stated by the teacher before or after the examples. With regard to learning the rule, therefore, the student plays a passive role in both of these presentations. This passivity on the part of the student runs contrary to findings of cognitive psychologists and researchers who stress that language learners need to be actively engaged in their learning, and that this learning need not involve

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 98 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.