Inductive (or) Deductive Learning? By the by which is more productive? :-)

Dear Friend / Colleage,

I am trying to crowdsource answers to couple of question i have on this thread. Firstly let me introduce these two magic terms. Using the “Global English” methodology that is fast becoming a solution for improving English Skills within the organization, among other things there are two ways in which English language skills can be acquired. These are Inductive and Deductive Learning.

In Deductive Learning the Learners are presented with a Rule or Generalization and they are required to apply the rule to the samples of Language data, whereas in Inductive Learning one works through samples of language(basically will be presented with several concrete examples) and will be encouraged to arrive at Generalization or Rules through a guided discovery process. So which one of the methods you think is more effective and why? I am not trying to limit these two concepts in terms of learning Language constructs only but any Learning that is useful to us either from a Professional versus Personal development stand point.

Coming to examples, i thought of my last post http://www.blogger.com/post-edit.g?blogID=1684304154016795642&postID=7737026130243313719 wherein i had described about Learning about a rule on Speed Vs Control with respect to driving from an Driving Expert and my attempt to explain the same with respect Oral Speech with a cross cultural setup - i was considering as an example of deductive learning. What is inductive learning? What is uttered by the Expert upon observing the real world driver behaviors over and over again. It might as well be learned from someone Expert as well, actually ;).

My question to you is that what kind of Learning would you be indulging most of the time? Is it Inductive or Deductive? Will you be able to share some public examples of some of your recent key learnings and attempt to categorize the same along the two categories please - This is purely from a greater understanding and assimilation of concepts. As I said these questions are being posed with crowdsourcing view which means together as group we would have lot many answers than any of us individually.

So, which kind of learning Inductive or Deductive is more preferable in your view? In other words which is more productive and why?

thanks

Jagan a.k.a J2M