Department of continuous professional education graduation paper

1.2. The Inductive Approach in Teaching Grammar
The inductive approach is also called the 'rule developing' approach. Schwarz stated that this approach induces the learners to realize grammar rules without any form of prior explanation. The path is from examples to rules. Induction, or learning through experience, is seen as the natural route to learning. Teachers who use this approach believe that the rules will become evident if learners are given or exposed to enough appropriate examples. When teaching a grammar point, their first step is to demonstrate the meaning to the class. The teacher keeps silent through this stage except to correct if necessary. The grammar point is shown on the board only after extensive practice. Explanations are not always made, though they may be elicited from the students themselves. In such cases, the mother tongue might well be used. The model is copied and the class may be required to write sample sentences from the model. This approach emphasizes big concepts, beginning with the whole and expanding to include the parts. The students’ learning is interactive, wherein knowledge is built based on what the students already know. The teacher’s role is interactive as well. The teacher creates a dialogue with the students while helping them construct their own knowledge. Students work in groups, so every learner's questions and interests are valued. There is also a varied assessment which includes students' works, observation, point of view, and even tests. However, the process of learning is deemed equally important as the product. Chung mentioned that the Communicative Language Teaching (CLT) or the covert approach has become the basis of the English Language Syllabus for many countries including Malaysia. In the covert approach, the teacher gets the people involved in using the structure without drawing attention to grammatical rules. The student's attention is focused on the activity and not the grammar rules but they have ample opportunity to practice the question forms because, in a covert approach, communicative learning is given priority.
The approach creates an environment where a lot of languages, known and unknown are met, mainly when doing speaking and listening tasks and where the students are helped with a new language only when they already have some awareness of it and have curiosity or questions about it. Furthermore, Christensson and Seiberling stated that focusing on Form, which can be incidental or planned, involves drawing attention to the grammatical forms during communicative-based activities. Incidental Focus on Form is when the teacher marks grammatical forms when errors occur in learners' communication, whereas planned Focus on Form is when the teacher makes a communicative-based task that brings out the use of a specific grammatical form by the learners.
to language teaching: those that focus on analyzing the language and those that focus on using the language. Students learn the elements of language building toward students' being able to use the elements to communicate. The latter encourage students to use the language from the start, however falteringly, in order to acquire it. Early in the previous century, this distinctive pattern was observable in the shift from the more form-oriented grammar translation approach to the use-oriented direct method. A more recent example of the shift is the loss of popularity of the cognitive-code approach, in which analyzing structures and applying rules are common practices, and the rise of more communicative approaches, which emphasize language use over rules of language usage. Even though such language use approaches as task-based and content-based are in favor these days, educators agree that speaking and writing accurately is part of communicative competence, just as is being able to get one's meaning across in an appropriate manner. Further, it has been observed that although some learners can "pick up" accurate linguistic form from exposure to the target language, few learners are capable of doing so efficiently, especially if they are post pubescent or if their exposure is limited to the class classroom, as is the case when English is taught as a foreign language. In contrast, research has shown that teachers who focus students' attention on linguistic form during communicative interactions are more effective than those who never focus on form or who only do so in decontextualized grammar lessons It follows, then, that most educators concur with the need to teach grammatical form. However, they advise doing so by "focusing on form" within a meaning-based or communicative approach in order to avoid a return to analytic approach in which contextualized language forms were the object of study. Focusing on grammatical form during communicative interactions rather than forms in isolation is one way to prevent the pendulum from swinging beyond its point of equilibrium. In this chapter, we will encourage a balance between grammar and communication. The first step is to come to a broader understanding of grammar than has usually been the case. Equating grammar with form and the teaching of grammar with the teaching of explicit linguistic rules concerning form are unduly limiting, representing what we have called myths which only serve to perpetuate the pendulum swing between language form and language use. Grammar is about form and one way to teach form is to give students rules; however, grammar is about much more than forms, and its teaching is ill served if students are simply given rules. Thus, by using our ternary scheme, we can classify the facts that affect the form, meaning, and use of the possessive structure. This is only a first step. Teachers would not necessarily present all these facts to students, recognizing that students can and do learn some of them on their own. And certainly, no teacher would choose to present all these facts in a single lesson or on one occasion. Nevertheless, distributing the features of the target grammatical structure among the three wedges of the pie can give teachers an understanding of the scope and multidimensionality of the structure. In turn, this understanding will guide teachers in deciding which facts concerning the possessive will be taught and when and how to do so. Before continuing to explore these decisions, however, it might be worthwhile to apply our approach to another grammar structure. Let us analyze phrasal verbs this time. By considering the three questions posed earlier, we can state the following about phrasal verbs Indeed; Donato has shown how students' participation in collaborative dialogue, through which learners can provide support for each other, has spurred development of learners inter language. Other research corroborates the value of an interactive dialogue as both a cognitive tool and a means of communication which can promote grammatical development. Beyond these reasons for giving students an opportunity to produce the target grammatical structures, we have already presented the idea that grammar teaching can better be thought of as developing “grammaring,” i.e., helping students be able to use grammar skillfully, a goal that requires significant practice. It used to be that the practice phase of a lesson was devoted almost exclusively to grammar drills and exercises. Ever since the ineffectiveness of using drills which do not engage students' attention was acknowledged, there has been little by way of guidance offered on how to give students meaningful practice. What follows, therefore, is an attempt to fill this void. Practice activities will be addressed in terms of which dimension of language they related.
When grammar is taught inductively, a teacher allows students to, on the basis of assumptions, induce and formulate a rule by themselves. Namely, students produce rules indirectly, applying a rule to exercises from a text. The teacher’s task is to provide the appropriate context where a certain rule is used, together with the appropriate context for communication. The main advantage of the inductive approach, according to Hinkel and Fotos, is fostering the mental effort and enabling development of students’ mental capabilities, analysis and making connection between the segments of speech, thus participating actively in the teaching process.⁸ They also assert that the knowledge acquired by unconscious process of identification and acquisition of the presented grammar rules can be stored for a longer period of time and implemented in practice without the conscious questioning of context which can be time-consuming. Naturally, the efficiency of the method is highly dependent on the teacher for it is highly demanding to find examples relevant for the given problem which will lead to the desirable conclusion. Moreover, the method could be time-consuming, wasting precious time that could otherwise be used for the reproduction of the learnt material, especially in the case when, for instance, the students are unable to produce a certain rule.
English grammar instruction is extremely important, especially for English majors and liberal studies majors. An Inductive Approach to English Grammar Teaching prescriptive and deductive approaches to English grammar teaching (e.g. pattern drills, rule memorization, etc.) have proved ineffective and boring, because the grammar of a language is acquired not through imitation but through abstracting a set of grammatical rules from language data. Given the fact that a native speaker of English has already acquired a subconscious knowledge of English grammar which enables him or her to make grammatical judgments about the well-formedness and structure of English sentences. The inductive approach in teaching grammar is a discovery learning approach in which teachers don’t teach the grammatical rules directly but let students discover them through a learning experience in terms of using the target language. For instance, the students can discover the rules through games, songs, or different activities that require the students’ engagement and interaction. In most inductive grammar lessons, the teacher introduces the grammatical rule by simply engaging students in a meaningful conversation. The teacher guides and scaffolds the students to notice the grammatical pattern, elicit the form, and then finally expose them to it.