What's in Your Approach

My "aha!" moment this week was about approaches to teaching. I was reminded that there is more than one way to guide one's students to learning a new language, or just about anything. As a math teacher, I nearly always used a deductive approach, but as a language teacher, it seems that an inductive approach may lead students to be able to not only learn about a new language, but to actually acquire it. Acquiring a new language means that a person can use it more like a native speaker, instead of having to translate from their first language. In the past, I have heard this referred to as thinking in the second language.



During one of our discussions on the topic of inductive vs. deductive teaching approaches, I notice that several of us used lack of time as a reason for choosing a deductive approach. It seems that the inductive approach requires both more preparation time for the teacher and more classroom time for the student to be able to benefit from it. However, we also seemed to conclude that we would like to be able to use the inductive approach more often, when it is appropriate for the learning task.

I came across the following quote while watching the last episode of Sewing with Nancy with my granddaughter. The episode is called I Sew for Fun  and it is about teaching sewing to young children by finding safe ways to involve them in the process.

“Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn.”

― Benjamin Franklin 

Here is a different take on deductive and inductive learning styles:

#CdnELT #LINCChat #grammar

-Vicky