The Effect of Field Dependence\Independence Cognitive Style on Deductive/Inductive Grammar Teaching

Recently, the interest of both teachers and researchers in the field of foreign language learning and teaching has increasingly focused on the learner, including the strategies which an individual uses in learning and communicating. The problem under investigation was to see whether there is any significant difference between the performances of field-independent learners in deductively/inductively taught grammar classes. The whole research was carried out in two major phases. In the first phase, The 54 field-independent subjects were randomly divided into two groups of 27 subjects. The researcher taught the first group deductively and the second group inductively. Finally, a post-test was administered. In the second phase, the same procedure was exactly carried out for field dependent learners. The results of the analyses for the collected data showed that there was a significant difference at the level of p<0.05 between the post-test scores of field dependent and independent subjects in the first group and their counterparts in the second group. In other words, the results of the study indicated that there was a cognitive style bias operating in conjunction with learning different grammatical structures regarding field-dependent/independent learners. Field-independent learners prefer deductive methods of teaching grammar whereas field-dependent ones prefer inductive methods of teaching grammar