Research and Perspectives on Processing Instruction

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

Angelovska

2015

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.

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 74%

The effects of Processing Instruction on the acquisition of English simple past tense: Age and cognitive task demands

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

Angelovska

2015

“…The effects of processing instruction have been compared to other instructional interventions (e.g., traditional instruction, meaning output-based instruction, dictogloss tasks, and input enhancement techniques). Overall, the results from these studies have shown that processing instruction is an effective pedagogical intervention at helping learners to process grammatical forms and structures affected by processing problems (Lee and Benati 2009). The research database on processing instruction includes learners from a variety of first languages (Chinese, English, Italian, Korean, Japanese) and age groups (adults and school-age learners), covers different languages (English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, German, Arabic and Spanish) and different language families, and it addresses a variety of linguistic forms and structures (e.g.…”

mentioning

confidence: 90%

The effects of re-exposure to instruction and the use of discourse-level interpretation tasks on processing instruction and the Japanese passive

International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching

2015

This experimental study explores immediate and re-exposure effects of processing instruction on the acquisition of Japanese passive forms as measured by sentence-level and discourse-level tasks. The passive construction in Japanese is affected by learners' use of the First Noun Strategy. Participants were English native speakers and were randomly assigned to one of three groups (processing instruction, processing instruction and re-exposure, and one control group), with the aim of measuring discourse-level and re-exposure effects. Two sentence-level tasks (interpretation and production), and one discourse level task (interpretation) were used in this experiment. The main findings from the study show that L2 learners receiving processing instruction not only improved in their ability to interpret and produce the target feature at sentence level, but they can also use the target forms to interpret discourse. Learners receiving re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment further improve their performance on both sentence-level and discourse-level tasks in an immediate and delayed post-tests battery.

“…Learners from different first languages and backgrounds (Lee & Benati, 2013) make consistent gains in interpretation and production tests at the sentence and discourse levels. The effects of processing instruction are consistent, durable, and measurable for different languages and different linguistics features affected by processing problems, with learners of different ages; and the positive effects are transferable (see the full reviews in Lee & Benati, 2009;Benati & Lee, 2015). Structured input practice is an effective form of input enhancement.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…By definition, such acquisition will be implicit in nature.'' Processing instruction consists of two main components: (a) explanation of the processing strategy, and (b) structured-input practice (Lee & Benati, 2009;Lee & VanPatten, 2003).…”

Section: Research Measuring the Effects Of Processing Instructionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Input manipulation, enhancement and processing: Theoretical views and empirical research

2016

SSLLT

Researchers in the field of instructed second language acquisition have been examining the issue of how learners interact with input by conducting research measuring particular kinds of instructional interventions (input-oriented and meaning-based). These interventions include such things as input flood, textual enhancement and processing instruction. Although the findings are not completely conclusive on whether these instructional interventions have an impact on acquisition, it is clear that we have witnessed a shift in the field from the original question "Does instruction make a difference?" to the more specific question "Does manipulating input make a difference?" In this article, the key classroom-based research conducted to measure the relative effects of different types of enhancement and manipulation is reviewed. Three main research foci are considered: (a) research measuring the effects of saturating the input with the target form (input flood), (b) research measuring the effects of different types of textual enhancements to draw learners' attention to the target form, and (c) research measuring input restructuring to improve interpretation and processing of target forms or structures (processing instruction).