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

Abstract

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.

Processing Instruction: A review of issues

“…First, it argues that future studies on PI need to be conducted for a longer duration, for most studies on PI were conducted in a very short period of time (e.g. Wong, 2015;Benati, 2015). Second, better operationalization of the instructional options with which PI is compared is required, since a number of instructional options were operationalized inconsistently.…”

“…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 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). Hence, the claim that PI is effective in developing production skills might still be premature, for the skills measured through blank-filling, sentence completion and sentence-based tests are not the same as the skills of using the target language, and thus target grammatical structures, in natural communication contexts (cf., Ellis, 2002).…”

“…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.…”

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

“…The effects of processing instruction were more significant in more controlled oral tests (completion test) rather than less controlled ones (video narration test). Benati, Lee, and Hikima (2010) and Benati (2015) have measured the effects of processing instruction on discourse-level interpretation tests. They measured the relative effects of processing instruction on the acquisition of Japanese passive forms (affected by a combination of principles such as the first noun principle, sentence location principle and primacy of content words principle).…”