The Relative Effectiveness of Three Types of Input-based Instruction: A Study of Japanese Learners of English1

The present study investigated the effects of three types of input-based approaches, deductive instruction, inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks, and inductive instruction with structured input tasks on the acquisition of pragmatic competence. Sixty adult intermediate proficiency native speakers of Japanese were randomly assigned to one of four groups consisting of three treatment groups and one control group. Each treatment group received one of the following kinds of instruction: (a) deductive instruction; (b) inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks; or (c) inductive instruction with structured input tasks. The purpose of the instruction was to establish knowledge about lexical/phrasal downgraders and syntactic downgraders in English for performing complex requests. All participants took a pre-test, a post-test, and a follow-up test. Each test was made up of two receptive judgment tasks and two production tasks. The results indicated that the three treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group (p < .006). However, in the listening test, only the participants in the deductive instruction group did not maintain the positive effects of the treatment between the post-test and the follow-up test.