The effects of deductive instruction and inductive instruction on learners' development of pragmatic competence in teaching Chinese as a second language

Abstract

The growing perceived importance of pragmatic competence has led to increased research attention on interlanguage pragmatics (ILP), which focuses on examining learners’ development of pragmatic competence when acquiring a second language. Among the various factors that influence the development of pragmatic competence, the efficacies of inductive vs. deductive approaches to pragmatic instruction have received much research attention. Empirical studies have been conducted to compare the effectiveness of these two approaches, but their research findings have been contradictory and inconclusive. This study further examines the effectiveness of explicit deductive instruction (DI) and explicit inductive instruction (II) on learners’ development of pragmatic competence in teaching Chinese as a second language (TCSL), using the speech act of request as the target pragmatic feature. Moreover, this study also investigates whether the effects of these two conditions are influenced by individual differences (i.e., L2 proficiency and cultural background).

This study adopts an experimental research design with the following structure: pretest-treatment-posttest-delayed posttest. The participants were 91 learners with intermediate-level proficiency in Chinese from one university in mainland China. The participants were randomly assigned to two treatment groups—DI group (N=45) and II group (N=46)—to study the speech act of request on two self-access websites. Participants in the DI group were presented with the explicit explanation of request-making rules before viewing examples in three video clips. In contrast, participants in the II group viewed the video clips first, and then were prompted to induce the rules through answering some questions before the explicit rules were provided to them. Data were primarily collected from the open-ended Discourse Completion Task (DCT) and semi-structured interviews.

Results show there was a statistically significant difference between the two instructional conditions, with inductive instruction having greater effects on CSL learners’ acquisition of the requests. In further analysis, this study found learners’ general L2 proficiency influenced the relative effectiveness of DI and II, with the latter tending to be more effective for higher level proficiency learners. The study found no significant moderating effects of cultural values on the efficacies of the two treatment conditions.

The findings illustrate that II could be more effective for teaching pragmatics in TCSL than DI, especially for learners of a higher proficiency level. Instructors might find the outcome rewarding if they were to increasingly use this type of instruction. This study also suggests the effects of different instructional approaches may be mediated by some individual difference factors; thus, specific teaching approaches need to take the target learner group into consideration. By examining the instructional effects of DI and II, this study contributes to the ILP research in both theoretical and practical aspects. It narrows a few existing gaps in this research area and provides worthwhile insights for future studies.