Teaching English grammar: Efficiency of inductive and deductive approaches students' perceptions

Abstract

This paper is aimed at investigating students' attitudes towards inductive and deductive approaches to teaching grammar of English as a foreign language. The study includes 134 students of Business School of Applied Studies in Blace. The research was conducted through a questionnaire which consists of 15 items concerning teaching English language, which students rated according to the Likert scale. At the beginning, different approaches to teaching grammar of a foreign language inductive and deductive are presented. Namely, it has been a constant debate whether grammar rules should be explicitly explained and then practiced through numerous examples, or whether the acquisition of foreign language gram­mar is more efficient when students are exposed to a foreign language and, based on context and everyday situations, they induce the rules by them­selves. According to the results of the questionnaire, over 70% of the students preferred the deductive approach to teaching English grammar, whereas over 40% of them acknowledged that the implicit approach is also important for grammar acquisition. Another conclusion indicates that the efficient acquisition of English grammar occurs when these two approaches are combined.

Keywords

• teaching English grammar
• inductive approach
• deductive approach
• students' preferences