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

Abstract

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.

Comparing the Effectiveness of Processing Instruction and Production-Based Instruction on L2 Grammar Learning: The Role of Explicit Information

“…Since then, a large body of research on different grammatical structures in different languages has been conducted, including Spanish preterit (past) tense (Cadierno, 1995), Spanish accusative clitics (VanPatten, Farmer, & Clardy, 2009;VanPatten & Fernandez, 2004;VanPatten, Inclezan, et al, 2009;VanPatten & Sanz, 1995), Spanish subjunctive (Farley, 2001), Italian future tense (Benati, 2001), Spanish copula verbs ser and estar (Cheng, 2002), French causative (VanPatten & Wong, 2004), English simple past tense (Benati, 2005;Benati & Angelovska, 2015), English simple present tense (Bayrak & Soruç, 2017), and Japanese past tense and passive constructions (Benati, 2016). All these studies found similarly that on interpretation tasks, learners exposed to PI performed significantly better than those receiving the different types of PBI mentioned above.…”

Processing Instruction: A review of issues

“…When researchers choose to apply explicit information in their PI treatment, however, it must contain information about the target form that learners are to learn along with the default mental strategies that they are likely to employ when processing the form (Benati & Angelovska, 2015). Also, it must be given prior to structured-input activities.…”

“…The advice might include information like: in the sentence "The men made Richard buy some bread", the agent of the action "bought" should be assigned to 'Richard', not to 'the men'. To make the advice even clearer, researchers may provide further but brief explanation as to why it is Richard instead of the men who bought some bread (Benati & Angelovska, 2015).…”

“…Meanwhile, in other PI studies, the production tests only included sentence-completion tasks. These two types of measurements (gap-filling and sentence-completion) are, in fact, still prevalent in the studies on PI (e.g., Benati, 2015;Benati & Angelovska, 2015;White, 2015). Even if the researchers claimed to have applied discourse-based tests in assessing interpretation and production skills in their study, the discourse-based tests they employed, however, were very simple and not far different from a sentence-based test (e.g., Benati, 2015;Wong, 2015;VanPatten & Uludag, 2011).…”

“…These studies were conducted with different aims, including, for instance, to examine the relative effectiveness of PI in assisting the acquisition of grammatical forms in different languages, such as Japanese (e.g., Benati, 2015), English (e.g., Benati & Angelovska, 2015), French (e.g., VanPatten & Wong, 2004) and even Latin (e.g., Cox & Sanz, 2015), or to compare the effectiveness between PI and other instructional options, such as Meaning-Based Output Instruction (e.g., Farley, 2001a;VanPatten, Farmer & Clardy, 2009), dictogloss tasks (Qin, 2008;VanPatten, Inclezan, Salazar, & Farley, 2009), text reconstruction tasks (Wong, 2015), etc. In general, the results of the series of these studies indicated that PI was more effective than all of the instructional options with which it was compared.…”