A Comparative Study Of Deductive And Inductive Approaches To Teaching English Grammar In A Primary School

The new curriculum standard requires English teachers to teach English in an interest-oriented way which causes the phenomenon of avoiding teaching grammar in primary schools in order not to spoil students’interest in English learning. Although interest is important in teaching, it does not mean that grammar becomes an untouchable field to primary school students which can not be taught. In fact, the problem in the teaching of English in primary schools is not teaching grammar or not but how to teach it. As long as the way of grammar teaching is appropriate and suits the psychological feature of the primary school students, the teaching of grammar will not spoil students’English learning interest but will enhance their English learning.As two common seen grammar teaching approaches, the deductive approach and inductive approach have their own advantages and disadvantages. Nevertheless, the research subjects of previous studies on deductive and inductive approaches were mainly college students, senior and junior high school students but almost no primary school students. According to such circumstance, this thesis emphasizes on the feasibility and effectiveness of primary English grammar teaching and compares the effects of deductive approach and inductive approach to find out a more appropriate way of grammar teaching for students of primary school through teaching experiment.The teaching experiment was conducted in a primary school of Beijing. And the teaching subjects were students from grade one to grade five. In each grade, there are two parallel classes, one class was taught with the deductive approach and the other was taught with the inductive approach. The experiment contains three stages, including the pre-experiment stage, the experiment stage and the post experiment stage. During the pre-experiment stage, the main task is to prepare the grammar points to be taught and the tests to be tested for each grade. In the experiment stage, the pre-test, grammar teaching, the immediate test and the delayed test were conducted accordingly in the two parallel classes of each grade. During the post experiment, data were collected and analyzed to get the experiment results in order to give feasible suggestions for teaching English grammar effectively in primary school.The results of the teaching experiment indicate that:(1) compared with the deductive approach, the inductive approach attracts students’ attention better and catches their interests better during the class; (2) the inductive approach is more effective on improving students’score; (3) the inductive approach is more acceptable for primary school students for it attracts students’ attention better during class and suits students’ psychological feature of discovering.Limited by objective condition, this research only covers a small study field on deductive and inductive approaches, many other problems need further discussion and this thesis puts forward some related suggestions.