The present study 1 investigates the effects of Processing Instruction on two different age groups and the role that cognitive task demands might play in the results generated by Processing Instruction. This study includes school-age children and adult native speakers of German learning English as a foreign language -a language combination not previously investigated within the Processing Instruction and individual differences research paradigm. The present study investigates directly whether two different age groups will benefit equally from Processing Instruction in altering their reliance on lexical temporal indicators and redirecting their attention to verb forms on Processing Instruction activities with different cognitive demands. The grammatical feature chosen for this study is the English past simple tense marking tested on both interpretation and production measures. The results from this study provide further evidence that the Processing Instruction is an effective instructional treatment in helping school-age children and adult L2 learners to make accurate form-meaning connections. The results from the first 1 This study was supported by a Leverhulme Trust post-doctoral fellowship grant. We would like to thank to the participants from the grammar school "Maria Ward Gymnasium" Nymphenburg and from the language centre of the Ludwig Maximilians University of Munich in Germany. We appreciate the willingness of their teachers to support this research. sentence-level interpretation task and the production task showed that Processing Instruction has positive and equal effects on both age groups (school-age learners and adults). The positive effects of instruction were maintained over the delayed post-test for both age groups who made similar gains on the immediate post-test. The results from the second (cognitively more complex) sentence-level interpretation task indicated that the adults made greater gains than school-age learners. However, both groups retained the positive effects of instruction over time. The difference in gains between the two age groups on the second sentence-level interpretation task can be explained in terms of cognitive processing load.
The prior language knowledge of learners for whom the target language is not the first foreign language poses a different starting learning situation that should merit pedagogical attention. The present paper seeks to contribute to the question of which pedagogical considerations can be made in regard to the role of prior language knowledge beyond instructed L2 grammar acquisition. Moreover, it fills a significant gap expanding the limited existing pedagogical options that instructors have at their disposal when it comes to teaching in classrooms where one foreign language is simultaneously chronologically first to some and second to others. Starting with (combinations of) existing theoretical accounts and associated pedagogical aspects (such as explicit information, negative evidence, metalinguistic explanations, grammar consciousness raising, and input enhancement), a recently developed method (Hahn & Angelovska, 2017) is discussed. The method acknowledges equally the three phases of input, practice and output and is applicable in instructed L2 grammar acquisition and beyond.
Using a novel combination of visual moving window paradigm and timed grammaticality judgment task, this study examines how third language (L3) learners (beginners and intermediate) with L2 German and different non-verb-second L1s process violated and non-violated main declarative sentences with fronted adverbials in L3 English. It examines the extent to which so far less-explored predictors (language dominance and proficiency) modulate non-facilitative word order transfer from the L2. Our results from experiment 1 corroborate existing (offline data) results (Angelovska, Tanja. 2017. (When) do L3 English learners transfer form L2 German? Evidence from spoken and written data by L1 Russian speakers. In Tanja Angelovska & Angela Hahn (eds.), L3 syntactic transfer: Models, new developments and implications (Bilingual Processing and Acquisition 5), 195–222. Amsterdam, Philadelphia: John Benjamins; Fallah, Nader & Ali Akbar Jabbari. 2018. L3 acquisition of English attributive adjectives dominant language of communication matters for syntactic cross-linguistic influence. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism 8. 193–216) and are in support of a hybrid transfer suggesting that neither proficiency nor dominance plays a role in transfer selection. Results from experiment 2 reveal that L1-dominance was the determining key factor for accuracy performance for low proficiency L3 subjects but higher L3 proficiency tended to neutralize this strong influence - providing evidence for the Scalpel Model (Slabakova, Roumyana. 2017. The scalpel model of third language acquisition. International Journal of Bilingualism 21. 651–665). We explain the contradictory results from the two experiments as a function of task effects.
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