Communicative Language Teaching and Russian: The Current State of the Field

Comer, William J.

doi:10.7135/upo9780857286505.007

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“…The challenge remains to take the results of this study and develop and disseminate a range of model PI and SI treatments for common grammar topics that can replace the mechanical exercises that still account for the bulk of grammar practice in current Russian textbooks at the elementary level (Comer, forthcoming). We started that work in our earlier study (Comer & deBenedette, ), but more remains to be done.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Processing Instruction and Russian: Further Evidence Is IN

Comer

deBenedette

2011

Foreign Language Annals

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Processing Instruction and Russian: Further Evidence is INIntroduction that there is no evidence from either a theoretical or an empirical standpoint that mechanical drills are necessary for language acquisition, regardless of the language being studied. In place of mechanical drills, Wong and VanPatten posit that focus-on-form instruction, and particularly one of its subsets, Processing Instruction (hereafter PI), can successfully replace mechanical drills in teaching L2 grammar. Leaver, Rifkin, and Shekhtman (2004) took issue with Wong and VanPatten (2003), raising many objections about the applicability of their conclusions to the teaching of Russian.In Wong and V -up to the response, the researchers challenged teachers of Russian to present empirical evidence that mechanical drills (i.e., traditional instruction, hereafter TI) are necessary for language acquisition, or that PI or other focus-on-form approaches would not work for Russian.The research study presented in this article is an attempt to do precisely that: the study compares the effects of TI and PI for learning a Russian syntactic construction involving directional versus location todestination] and at -location] distinction represents a similar learning challenge to the French causative faire construction featured in Wong and VanPatten (2003), although the nature of the processing problem is different in the two languages. Information) 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 Processing Instruction and Russian: Further 2 *Manuscript (No Author BackgroundThe Evidence for PI PI is an instructional intervention that seeks to alter certain faulty processing strategies that language learners exhibit, and VanPatten (2004) has formulated and explicated these faulty processing strategies in his theory of Input Processing. The first study to describe the effects of production of Spanish object pronouns in sentences with SVO and OVS word order. On this first noun of a sentence as the subject or agent, even if this was grammatically impossible.on learning to correctly interpret oral and written input involving Spanish pronouns, while the TI group followed the traditional progression of mechanical, meaningful and communicative drills found in the most popular textbook of Spanish in use at that time. Thus the TI group was focused entirely on producing forms, while the PI group did extensive work on interpretation of forms, including receiving explicit instruction about the processing problem involving the Spanish object pronouns and the First Noun Principle. In the post-test, the PI group exhibited greater improvement than the TI group on the interpretation tasks and made gains similar to the TI group in producing sentences with object pronouns, even though the PI group did not create a single sentence with this form during the treatment. The TI group...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%