Abstract
This study compared deductive and inductive approaches of teaching tenses to secondary school learners. The aim of this study was to test the efficiency of the two instructional approaches of teaching tenses by observing learners’ performance. Sixty participants (37 female and 23 male), learning English in the Kingdom of Eswatini, participated in this quasi-experimental study. Convenience sampling was used to select participants who were randomly assigned to two control groups. The independent variable was ‘teaching method,’ with two levels: deductive versus inductive. The dependent variables were participants’ achievement scores derived from the pre-test and post-test. The independent t-test and the dependent t-test were used to analyse data. The results revealed that there was no significant difference between the deductive and inductive approaches in teaching tenses,although each method was effective in isolation. Based on the findings, this study recommends an integration of the two approaches in the teaching of tenses.
 
 
 Keywords: ESL context, deductive approach, grammar, inductive approach, tenses.
Highlights
Teaching of tenses is very crucial in second language acquisition
Without sufficient knowledge of tenses, no one can become a good English language learner or speaker(Babu &Kumar, 2017).learners need to master tensesif they have to achieve linguistic and communicativecompetence.Research in this area has revealed that tenses occupy a major part in language teaching, many learners in English as Second Language (ESL) contexts continue making mistakes even when they are at higher levels of education (Rahman & Ali, 2015).Widodo (2006) posits that two basic teaching approaches can be applied to solve this problem: the deductive and the inductive approaches.this studycomparedthe deductive and inductive instructional approaches to the teaching of tenses to secondary school learners in Eswatini
The findings showed that the deductive approach was more effective than the inductive approach.Berendse (2012) carried out a study to investigate the effectiveness of the deductive and inductive approach in the teaching of the English simple past and present perfect tenses to Dutch secondary school learners
Summary
Teaching of tenses is very crucial in second language acquisition. The aim was to investigate the impact of each approach. Deductive–inductive dichotomy is one of the most controversial topics in language teaching and learning (Benitez-Correa, Gonzalez-Torres, Ochoa-Cueva & Vargas-Saritama, 2019). According to Glaser (2013), the point of departure in deductive and inductive approaches is the sequencing of instructions. The question of whatcomes first between the rules (grammar) and the language (usage). The grammatical rules are given right at the beginning of a lesson, before the examples for practice and production. Exercises to test whether learners can infer the target rules are the starting point in the inductive approach. The controversy centres on theefficacy of the two instructional approaches
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