The Effects of Deductive and Inductive Instruction on the Development of Language Learners' Pragmatic Competence

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.