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- Title
The Effects of Deductive and Inductive Instruction on the Development of Language Learners' Pragmatic Competence.
- Authors
TAKIMOTO, MASAHIRO
- Abstract
The present study investigated the effects of deductive and inductive teaching approaches to the acquisition of pragmatic competence on learners of English as a foreign language. In this study, 60 adult native speakers of Japanese with intermediate-level proficiency in English were each randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups, which consisted of 3 treatment groups and 1 control group. Each treatment group received one of the following kinds of instruction in English pragmatics: (a) deductive instruction, (b) inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks, or (c) inductive instruction with structured input tasks. Both the deductive and inductive approaches constituted different types of explicit input-based instruction. The purpose was to teach the learners how to use lexical/phrasal downgraders and syntactic downgraders in English to perform complex requests. All participants completed a pretest, a posttest, and a follow-up test. Each test included 2 receptive judgment tasks and 2 production tasks. The 3 treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group ( p < .006). However, for the listening test, only the participants in the deductive instruction group showed a reduction in the positive effects of the treatment between the posttest and the follow-up test.
- Subjects
FOREIGN language education in universities &; colleges; ENGLISH as a foreign language; PRAGMATICS; LANGUAGE acquisition; SEMANTICS (Philosophy); PHILOSOPHY of language
- Publication
Modern Language Journal, 2008, Vol 92, Issue 3, p369
- ISSN
0026-7902
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1111/j.1540-4781.2008.00752.x