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• The teacher shows the learners pictures of people who have been doing some kind of
activity, for example somebody covered in paint, somebody who is very red and sweaty,
somebody who is looking green and nauseous, and the learners match these pictures to
others which show activities, e.g. a rollercoaster, a freshly painted room, a running track.
• The teacher then presents the new language by describing what these people have been
doing.
• The learners listen and then repeat the language. The teacher then explains the structure,
how it works, and how it is made.
• Learners then practise the language in another matching activity, where they have to
report their findings in sentences, e.g. ‘On card A there is a man who has been eating
chocolate cake, on card B there is a man who has been running for a bus’. Freer practice
is a game where learners act and others guess what they have been doing.
Why use the inductive approach?
• It moves the focus away from the teacher as the giver of knowledge to the learners as
discoverers of it.
• It moves the focus away from rules to use – and use is, after all, our aim in teaching.
• It encourages learner autonomy. If learners can find out rules for themselves then they
are making significant steps towards being independent. We can take this further by
letting learners decide what aspect of the language in a text they want to analyse.
• It teaches a very important skill – how to use real/almost-real language to find out the
rules about English.
• It can be particularly effective with low levels and with certain types of young learners. It
enables these students to focus on use, not complex rules and terminology.
• If we use authentic material as our context, then learners are in contact with real
language, not coursebook English.
• We can exploit authentic material from a wide range of sources to present our target
language.
• The rules and structures students discover are often more valid, relevant and authentic
than in a deductive approach, as they can be drawn from real use of English.
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