Page 197 - Beyond Methods

Activating intuitive heuristics 185
to think about its underlying rationale—a tendency that might lead to a superficial knowledge rather than a sound understanding of the rule. This might be one reason why we often come across learners who can supply the correct grammar on a class test but cannot use it for communicative purposes outside the class.
Reflective task 8.4
With reference to your specific L2 learning and teaching situation, what fea- tures of the deductive method would you keep and what features would you give up or modify? Why?
Inductive Teaching and Intuitive Heuristics
The inductive approach is based on the premise that the essence of grammar teaching lies in helping learners discover what the gram- matical rules are. Teachers present their learners with contextual- ized oral and written samples of a grammatical element, draw their attention to it in different ways, and guide them to see and hear the underlying pattern. They avoid explicit description and explana- tion, and minimize the use of technical terms, at least at the initial stages of teaching a particular grammatical item. Learners analyze the samples provided to them and try to develop a working hypoth- esis that can later be confirmed or rejected based on additional in- formation and experience.
It is easy to see why the inductive method of teaching is well suited to activate the intuitive heuristics of the learner. In inductive teaching, learners have an opportunity to encounter a grammatical structure or a language expression “several times in contexts where its relationship to the design of the language may be observed, and its meaning (structural, lexical, and socio-cultural) inductively ab- sorbed from its use in such varying situations” (Rivers, 1964, p. 152). Such encounters can help them infer the underlying rules and principles governing the communicative use of grammatical structures. It can also help them see grammar “as a comprehensive conglomerate, uniting all the levels of structure or rule complexes of a language, viz. the structure of words and phrases, the structure of sentences, the structure of texts and the structure of interaction”