Teaching Conditionals in English Inductively and Deductively: A Practical Comparative Study

Abstract

This study aims at determining the effectiveness of inductive and deductivemethods in teaching conditional sentences. The researcher herself was involved in theexperimental teaching for the purpose of carrying out the research. Thetests (pre-test andpost-test) were the major tools for data elicitation. A pre-test was administered beforeactual classroom teaching and a post-test was administered immediately after classroomteaching. The same set of test-items was used in both typeof tests. The test-items wereused for written test. Each item was of twenty marks and contained 20 questions each. On the basis of the result of the pre-test, the students were ranked according totheir individual scores and then they were divided into two groups, i.e. Group ‘A’ andGroup ‘B’. Group ‘A’ was taught inductively whereas Group ‘B’ was taught deductively.Both groups were taught the same grammatical items, i.e. conditional sentences, using thesame instructional materials which were prepared before classroom teaching. Each groupwas taught for two weeks two periods a day and each period was of 45 minutes. After teaching two weeks, a post-test was administered. The result of the pre-testand post-test were tabulated and analyzed group-wise from different angles, i.e.comparison in general, item-wise comparison, sex-wise comparison and group-wisecomparison of boys and girls in different test items separately to achieve the objective ofthe study. This study shows that deductive method is more effective and more meaningfulthan the inductive one in teaching conditional sentences in English. Therefore, it isrecommended that deductive method should be applied by the teachers to teachconditional sentences in English in general. This thesis is divided into four chapters: introduction, methodology, analysis andinterpretation, and findings and recommendations. The first chapter introduces the study in terms of General Background i.e.Importance of English Language, Importance of Grammar, Method of TeachingLanguage/Grammar, its differences, Conditional Sentences: Forms, Meaning and Rules,Rational of the Study, Review of Related Literature, Objectives of the Study,Significance of the Study and Definition of the Specific Terms. The second chapter deals with the methodology adopted to carry out this research.It contains primary and secondary sources of data, population of the study, samplingprocedure, tools for data collection, process of data collection and limitation of the study. The third chapter deals with the analysis and interpretation of the data. Thischapter includes, the analysis of the data in comparison of the performance of thestudents on the basis of different test items to find out the relative effectiveness ofinductive or deductive method. The final chapter presents the findings and recommendations, findings are derivedfrom the data interpretation and recommendations are made on the basis of the findings inchapter three.