The importance of students' active involvement in the learning process is increasingly growing in this era of information explosion.
Educators continue to unravel ways to assist learners in developing their cognitive potential.
Deductive learning and inductive learning which help students articulate their mental processes seem to incorporate many of the research studies propounded by ESL practitioners. These approaches have proved to give students the ability to rationalize what information is needed and, thereby, to make them conscious of the intent and content of the lessons presented to them. Although these kinds of learning appear to be widely used across age groups, reported evidence of their use in college classes has rarely been found. This article describes the implementation of deductive and inductive methods for two lessons I actually observed of 30 Saudi freshmen students who participated in this study. This paper discusses the identification of the instructional goals along with the cognitive tasks by which students internalize the concepts taught.