A Case Study on Adopting Inductive Grammar Teaching Approaches for Junior High School English in Taiwan: Learning Process Analysis and Learners’ Perceptions

Abstract

Under Taiwan’s bilingual education policy and ELF (English as a Lingua Franca) trends, students’ communicative competence has been expected. On the other hand, in the exam-oriented context, the importance of grammar learning remains undiminished. Such dilemmas call for different methods to focus on form, meaning, and use of English (Larsen-Freeman, 2007). Therefore, research on grammar teaching remains needed. The advantages of inductive grammar teaching have been extensively discussed (Ergasheva, 2021; Pittman, 2021; Widodo, 2006). However, most previous studies were based on the learning performance as quantitative data to show the effectiveness of inductive approach compared to deductive approach (Benitez-Correa, et al., 2019; Dang & Nguyen, 2012; Huang, 2023). Little focused on what learners do and think within a case study. Furthermore, few inductive teaching materials and practices involved meaning-focused, contextualized, and student-centered tasks.

This study attempted to adopt inductive approach to teach relative clauses and strike a balance between grammar learning and communicative competence. Teaching materials were designed in the 5E Instructional Model (Bybee, et al., 2006). 1-week lessons were given by the researcher to the class including 6 eighth-graders in a language institution. The class activities engaged learners in groups to co-construct the rules without the teacher’s immediate intervention. This study explored learners’ learning behavior and perceptions via the data collected from classroom observation by 2 English teachers, work sheets, open-ended questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews. Students’ learning process was analyzed by the 5E Instructional Model to investigate how the materials and activities worked and how learners engaged.

The results indicated that the lesson design guided learners’ discovery and application of target linguistic knowledge and made learners attentive and motivated to notice and explore it. Students’ perceptions reflected how inductive approaches influenced their attitudes toward grammar learning. Based on the results, pedagogical implications were further discussed.

Keywords

English grammar teaching, inductive grammar teaching, learning process, learner perceptions, relative clauses