The present study investigated the effects of deductive and inductive teaching approaches to the acquisition of pragmatic competence on learners of English as a foreign language. In this study, 60 adult native speakers of Japanese with intermediate-level proficiency in English were each randomly assigned to 1 of 4 groups, which consisted of 3 treatment groups and 1 control group. Each treatment group received one of the following kinds of instruction in English pragmatics: (a) deductive instruction, (b) inductive instruction with problem-solving tasks, or (c) inductive instruction with structured input tasks. Both the deductive and inductive approaches constituted different types of explicit input-based instruction. The purpose was to teach the learners how to use lexical/phrasal downgraders and syntactic downgraders in English to perform complex requests. All participants completed a pretest, a posttest, and a follow-up test. Each test included 2 receptive judgment tasks and 2 production tasks. The 3 treatment groups performed significantly better than the control group (p less than 0.006). However, for the listening test, only the participants in the deductive instruction group showed a reduction in the positive effects of the treatment between the posttest and the follow-up test.