Focus On Form vs Abduction

Hello everyone,
I can’t grasp the difference between “abduction” and “focus on form” in the grammar teaching. They look almost identical to me in terms of raising-consciousness after having students do a structured activity. Does the difference between the two lie in making them notice particular forms (for ex: in a reading text) before the activity?

I have never heard of 'abduction' in the context of grammar, Where did you encounter this word?

5jj said:

I have never heard of "abduction' in the context of grammar, Where did you encounter this word?

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It's from Teaching by Principles by H. Douglas Brown and it's on page 467. If it's appropriate, I can share the text here.

In the version of the book I found online, page 467 was part of the Name Index, and 'abduction' did not appear in the Index. It would help if you could quote a few relevant lines here.

freijorn said:

Hello, everyone.
I can’t grasp the difference between “abduction” and “focus on form” in the grammar teaching. They look almost identical to me in terms of raising no hyphen here consciousness after having students do a structured activity. Does the difference between the two ile in making them notice particular forms (for example, in a reading text) before the activity?

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Note my corrections above. I don't know what you meant to type when you typed "ile" but clearly that isn't what you meant.

(In the version of the book I found online, page 467 is part of the bibliography.)

Gladly. My book is the fourth edition. (I’m sorry. I forgot to click on the reply option and I’ve just noticed.)

"Abduction refers to the exploratory process of trying out tentative solutions to problems or facts to figure out what may happen, to see if they work, or to experience something new. Language teachers can start with abduction, taking experiential and exploratory approaches (e.g., puzzle-based learning) and then move on to either inductive or deductive tasks as relevant, followed with further exploration at a wider or deeper level. Consider the following example (adapted from van Lier, 2011a, p. 13)"

"Abduction in the L2 classroom:
1. Choose an authentic text that incorporates some features you want to highlight. Possible option: Input enhancement, relative clauses.
2. Design an activity that focuses on these features. Example: Relative clauses embedded into an information-gap map activity.
3. Students work in groups and note the grammatical features or patterns they observe.
4. Students report their findings to the class.
Expansion:
5. Inductive: Students collect further examples illustrating the pattern(s) found and formulate a general rule.
6. Deductive: Teacher and students formulate a rule, check it in a grammar book, and look at examples that illustrate the rule."

Source: Teaching by Principles by H. Douglas Brown (4th edition)

emsr2d2 said:

Note my corrections above. I don't know what you meant to type when you typed "ile" but clearly that isn't what you meant.

(In the version of the book I found online, page 467 is part of the bibliography.)

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Thank you for corrections. I mistakenly wrote ile instead of lie.

My book is the fourth edition.

Abduction doesn't have anything to do with grammar. The example given in Brown just happens to be a way to get learners to use an abductive approach to learn a particular grammar point. Abduction, along with induction and deduction, are different ways of reasoning about things to arrive at conclusions.

Focusing on form is about exactly that—paying attention to the grammatical form of a particular language item.