Chapter 7
Processing
Instruction and
Structured Input
In this chapter
we explore:
 The nature of input processing
 Processing instruction, a grammar
instruction that has structured input
at its core
 Research on processing instruction
that demonstrates its effectiveness
 A set of guidelines for developing
structured input activities
Input processing
 Traditional instruction consisting of drills in
which learner output is manipulated and the
instruction is divorced from meaning or
communication is not an effective method for
enhancing language acquisition.
 What is needed is a new pedagogy of
grammar instruction that takes as its point of
departure what we know about how
grammatical forms and structures are
acquired.
 This pedagogy needs to work with input and
with the processes learners use to get data
from that input.
Input processing
 Of concern is input processing, how
learners initially perceive and process
linguistic data in the language they hear.
 In input processing, learners might
encounter their first problems in dealing
with the properties of the new language.
 We must come to some understanding of
what input processing looks like.
Intake from input
 Input processing is concerned with
those psycholinguistic strategies and
mechanisms by which learners derive
intake from input.
 Intake refers to the linguistic data in
the input that learners attend to and
hold in working memory during online
comprehension.
Form
 Research on input processing
attempts to explain how learners get
form from input while their primary
attention is on meaning.
 Form here is defined as surface
features of language, although input
processing is also relevant to syntax.
The most complete
model
 VanPatten (1996,2003b) presents the most
complete model of input processing in
SLA.
 The role of working memory is important in
this model since some of the principles are
predicated on a limited capacity for
processing.
 Humans develop mechanisms that allow
them to selectively attend to incoming
stimuli. Without such mechanisms, there
would be informational overload.
VanPatten’s
Principles
 Principle 1(P1). The Primacy of Meaning
Principle. Learners process input for
meaning before they process it for form.



P1a. The Primacy of Content Words Principle.
Learners process content words in the input before
anything else.
P1b. The Lexical Preference Principle. Learners
will tend to rely on lexical items as opposed to
grammatical form to get meaning when both encode
the same semantic information.
P1c. The Preference for Nonredundancy
Principle. Learners are more likely to process
nonredundant meaningful grammatical form before
they process redundant meaningful forms.
VanPatten’s Principles
continued…



P1d. The Meaning-before-Nonmeaning
Principle. Learners are more likely to process
meaningful grammatical forms before
nonmeaningful forms irrespective of redundancy.
P1e. The Availability of Resources Principle. For
learners to process either redundant meaningful
grammatical forms or nonmeaningful forms, the
processing of overall sentential meaning must not
drain available processing resources.
P1f. The Sentence Location Principle. Learners
tend to process items in sentence initial position
before those in final position and those in medial
position.
VanPatten’s Principles
continued…
 Principle 2(P2). The First Noun
Principle. Learners tend to process the
first noun or pronoun they encounter in
a sentence as the subject or agent.

P2a. The Lexical Semantics Principle.
Learners may rely on lexical semantics,
where possible, instead of word order to
interpret sentences.
VanPatten’s Principles
continued…

P2b. The Event Probabilities Principle.
Learners may rely on event probabilities,
where possible, instead of word order to
interpret sentences.

P2c. The Contextual Constraint
Principle. Learners may rely less on the
First Noun Principle if preceding context
constrains the possible interpretation of a
clause or sentence.
Based on VanPatten (2003b)
Principle 1
 That learners are driven to get meaning
from input (P1) has a set of consequences,
the first being that content words are
searched out first.
 A great deal of form that is meaningoriented or has referential meaning may
also be expressed by a lexical item or
phrase elsewhere in the sentence.
 This observation led to the creation of the
construct communicative value
(VanPatten, 1985b).
Communicative
value
 Communicative value refers to the meaning
that a form contributes to overall sentence
meaning and is based on two features.


[+/- inherent semantic value]
[+/- redundancy]
 If meaning can be retrieved elsewhere and
not just from the form itself, then the
communicative value of the form is
diminished.
 Forms with [- semantic value], regardless of
redundancy, contain no communicative value.
Nature of
communicative value
 The nature of communicative value is
important for input processing.
 The more communicative value a
form has, the more likely it is to get
processed and made available in the
intake data for acquisition (P1d).
Conversely…
 The less communicative value a form has,
the more likely learners are to “skip” it in
the input.
 For learners to process forms of little or no
communicative value in the input, they
must be able to comprehend an utterance
such that the act of comprehension does
not tie up all their attentional resources.
P1f
 From P1f it is clear that learners
perceive and process items in one
position better than another.
 For example, learners are much more
likely to pick up question words and
their syntax than object pronouns or
the subjunctive, which tends to occur
inside the sentence.
Word order
 Input processing is also concerned with
word order.
 P2, the first noun principle, may have
important effects on the acquisition of a
language that does not follow strict
subject-verb-object (SVO) word order.
 A Juan no le gusta esta clase mucho.
(literally, “To Juan is not very pleasing this
class,” meaning “This class is not very
pleasing to Juan.”
Erroneous input
 Research has shown that learners do
indeed encode such pronouns and noun
phrases as subjects, thus delivering
erroneous input to their developing
linguistic systems.
 They think that Juan is the subject.
 It is not that meaning is gotten elsewhere;
it is that meaning is not gotten at all or is
gotten wrong.
 The form-meaning connections are not
only filtered, they are altered.
Summary
 Research on input processing attempts to
describe:




What linguistic data learners attend to during
comprehension
Which ones they do not attend to
What grammatical roles learners assign to nouns
How position in an utterance influences what gets
processed.
 Intake is grammatical information as it relates
to meaning that learners have comprehended
(or think they have comprehended.)
A reminder…
 As a reminder, input processing is but one
set of processes related to acquisition
 That learners derive some kind of intake
from the input does not mean that the data
contained in the intake automatically make
their way into the developing mental
representation of the L2 in the learner’s
head (i.e., intake does not equal
acquisition).
Rethinking grammar
instruction: Structured
input
 We now have some idea of what
learners are doing with input when
they are asked to comprehend it.
 We can begin to develop a new kind
of grammar instruction-one that will
guide and focus learners’ attention
when they process input.
Processing
instruction
 Processing instruction consists of three
basic components:



Learners are given information about a
linguistic structure or form.
Learners are informed about a particular
processing strategy that may negatively affect
their picking up of the form or structure during
comprehension.
Learners are pushed to process the form or
structure during activities with structured
input- input that is manipulated in particular
ways to push learners to become dependent on
form and structured to get meaning.
Processing-oriented
grammar instruction
InputIntakeDeveloping SystemOutput
Processing Mechanisms
Focused Practice
An example of relating
processing strategies to
instruction: Verb morphology
 We turn to activities that focus learners’
attention on verb endings; the goal is for
learners to use these morphological
endings to comprehend tense rather than
solely rely on lexical items.
 After learners receive a brief explanation
of how past-tense endings work, they
might first practice attaching the concept
of past time to verb forms in an activity
such as the following.
Listening for time
reference
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Listen to each sentence. Indicate
whether the action occurred last week or
is part of a set of actions oriented toward
the present.
John talked on the phone.
Mary helped her mother.
Robert studies for two hours.
Sam watched TV.
Lori visits her parents.
Structuring the input
 Note that only the very ending
encodes tense in the input sentence.
 Lexical terms and discourse that
would indicate a time frame are not
present, thereby encouraging
learners to attend to the grammatical
markers for tense.
 The input has been structured.
An example of relating
processing strategies to
instruction: Adjective agreement
 This time we focus on the following
strategy: P1d. Learners are more
likely to process meaningful
grammatical forms before
nonmeaningful forms, irrespective of
redundancy.
 Some features of language do not
have inherent semantic or
communicative value.
For example…
 In the Romance languages, adjectives must
agree in number and gender with the
nouns they modify, but this feature of
grammar contributes little or nothing to the
meaning of the utterance in most cases.
 In the following Spanish-language activity,
learners’ attention is directed toward
proper adjective form by a task in which
the adjective endings must be attended to.
Who is it?
Listen to each sentence in which a person is
described. Determine which person is
being described and then indicate
whether you agree or disagree.
David Letterman
Madonna
1. Es dinámica. (She’s dynamic.)
2. Es comprensivo. (He’s understanding.)
3. Es reservada. (She’s reserved.)
An example of relating
processing strategies to
instruction: The French causative
 Remember that learners apply a first-noun
strategy to determine subjects and objects
of sentences (“who did what to whom”)
 With the French causative, this leads to
misinterpretation and nonacquisition.
 In this activity, learners are pushed to
process correctly; to be sure this happens,
sentences with the noncausative faire
(faire du ski, “to ski”) that involve two
people are also included.
Who is performing?
Listen to each sentence. Then answer the
question.
1. Who cleans the room?
2. Who packs the bags?
[Teacher’s script] Read each sentence
ONCE. After each sentence, ask for an
answer.
1. Claude fait nettoyer la chambre à
Richard.
2. Marc fait les valises pour Jean.
Research on
processing instruction
 There has been ongoing research
regarding the effectiveness of processing
instruction.
 An important part of this research has
examined the relative effects of processing
instruction versus those of traditional
instruction.
 The study that launched this research
agenda is VanPatten and Cadierno (1993).
 It is the most frequently cited study and
has been the impetus for a number of
replication studies.
Research questions
 VanPatten and Cadierno sought to answer
the following research questions:



Does altering the way in which learners
process input have an effect on their
developing systems?
If there is an effect, is it limited solely to
processing more input or does instruction in
input also have an effect on output?
If there is an effect, is it the same effect that
traditional instruction has (assuming an effect
for the latter)?
Focus of the
research
 VanPatten and Cadierno compared three
groups of learners:



A processing instruction group (number=27)
A traditional instruction group (number=26)
A control group (number=27)
 The processing group received instruction
based along the lines presented earlier.
 The focus was word order and object
pronouns in Spanish.
Who did what
 In the processing treatment, learners first
received activities with right or wrong
answers (“Select the picture that best goes
with what you hear”) followed by activities in
which they offered opinions.
 In the traditional group, learners received
involving a typical explanation of object
pronouns and the complete paradigms of the
forms.
 The control group did not receive instruction
on the target structure and instead read an
essay and discussed it in class.
Assessment
 Assessment consisted of two tests: a
sentence-level interpretation test and
a sentence-level production test.
 These were administered as a
pretest, an immediate posttest, a twoweek delayed posttest, and a fourweek delayed posttest.
Assessment
continued…
 The interpretation test consisted of ten
target items and ten distractors.
 The production test consisted of five items
with five distractors.
 The interpretation group was based on an
activity performed by the processing group
(“Select the picture that best goes with
what you hear.”)
 The production test was based on an
activity the traditional group performed
(“Complete the sentence based on the
Results!
 The pretests yielded no differences among the
groups on the two tests prior to treatment.
 In the posttesting phase, the processing
group made significant gains on the
interpretation test whereas the traditional and
control groups did not.
 On the production test, both the traditional
and processing groups made significant gains
but were not significantly different from each
other.
 The control group did not make significant
gains.
Conclusions
 Altering the way learners process
input could alter their developing
systems.
 The effects of processing instruction
are not limited to processing but also
show up on production measures.
 The effects of processing instruction
are different from those of traditional
instruction.
Two for one
 By being pushed to process form and
meaning simultaneously, learners with
processing instruction not only could
process better but also could access their
newfound knowledge to produce a
structure that never produced during the
treatment stage.
 Members of the traditional group learner to
do a task, while the members of the
processing group actually experienced a
change in their underlying knowledge that
allowed them to perform on different kinds
Areas for future
research
 Are the effects of processing instruction
(PI) generalizable to other structures?
 Are the effects of PI due to different
explicit information?
 Are the effects of PI observable with
different assessment tasks?
 Are the effects of PI different from the
effects of other types of instruction?
 Do the effects of PI hold over time?
Are the effects of P1
generalizable to other
structures?
 Cadierno (1995) replicated the VanPatten
and Cadierno study using the Spanish
preterite (past) tense as the target structure.
 Again contrasting a control group, a
traditional instruction (TI) group, and a
processing instruction (PI) group, Cadierno
measured the effects of treatment via two
measures:


An interpretation test (Is the sentence you’re
hearing present, past, or future?)
A production test (writing sentences in the past)
Results
 Cadierno’s results matched those of
VanPatten and Cadierno exactly
 On the interpretation test, the PI group
improved significantly, but the other two
groups did not.
 On the production test, both the PI and TI
groups improved significantly but were not
different from each other.
Cheng’s study
 In her dissertation, Cheng (1995)
conducted a study with ser and estar, the
two major copular verbs in Spanish.
 She compared a control, a processing, and
a traditional group in the use of copular
verbs with adjectives as the target.
 Her results mirrored those of the original
VanPatten and Cadierno study.
Farley’s study
 In another study, Farley (2001a)
demonstrated the effects of PI on the
Spanish subjunctive with noun
clauses.
 In his study he showed that
participants who received PI made
significant gains in both
interpretation and production abilities
with the subjunctive both in form and
use.
Buck’s dissertation
 Buck (2000) investigated the relative
effects of PI and TI in the acquisition of the
present continuous (versus the present
progressive) in English by native speakers
of Spanish.
 “Bill is smoking a pipe” versus “Bill smokes
a pipe.”
 He results indicated greater gains for the
processing group that were maintained
over time on the interpretation test.
VanPatten and Wong
 In one other study, VanPatten and Wong
(2003) demonstrated that PI was superior
to TI with the French causative.
 They compared a control, a processing,
and a traditional group and measured
outcomes with an interpretation and a
production test.
 Their results were the same as the results
of the original study.
Acquisition of verbal
morphology
 In another study involving the acquisition of
verbal morphology, Benati (2001) compared
PI, TI, and a control group using the Italian
future tense as the target structure.
 His results were similar to but not the same as
those of the original study.
 On the interpretation task, the PI group
improved significantly, the TI group did as
well, and the control group did not.
 However, the gains made by the PI group were
significantly greater than those of the TI
group. PI>TI>C
Are the effects of PI due to
different explicit
information?
 In VanPatten and Oikennon (1996), the
researchers compared three groups.


One that received PI exactly as in the original
VanPatten and Cadierno study.
Another that received the structured input
activities only, with no prior explicit information
and no explanation during the activities

Another that received explicit information only,
with no structured input activities.
 The researchers used the same
assessment tests as in the original study.
Results
 Both the regular processing group
and the structured input-only group
improved significantly but were not
different from each other.
 The effects of PI are due not to the
explicit information provided to
learners but to the particular nature
of the structured input activities.
Computer-assisted
language learning (CALL)
 Sanz and Morgan-Short (2003) set out to
test whether explicit feedback is
necessary or helpful to learners.
 They tested four groups using the variables
[+/- explanation] and [+/- explicit feedback].
 All groups, regardless of the combinations
of these variables, received the same
structured input as practice.
The groups
 The first group was [+ explanation] (explicit
information about the language and how to
process it in the input) and [+ explicit
feedback] (telling learners not only
whether an answer is correct or not but
what the problem is if the answer is not
correct0
 The second group was [- explanation] and
[- explicit feedback] (learners received
structured input only, with indications only
of whether their answers were right or
wrong.
The groups
continued…
 The third group was [+ explanation]
but [- explicit feedback].
 The fourth group was [- explanation]
but [+ explicit feedback].
Results
 The results showed that all groups improved
significantly on the three assessment tasks
(interpretation and two production tasks- a
sentence-completion task and a videoretelling task) from pre- to posttests.
 The researchers found that no group was
better than any other on any task.
 Neither explicit information nor explicit
feedback seemed to be crucial for a change in
performance.
 Practice in decoding structured input alone
(as in the second group) seemed to be
sufficient.
Benati’s study
 In one other recent study, Benati
(2003) reported similar findings with
the Italian future tense.
 He compared a regular PI groups
with a structured input-only group
and an explicit information-only
group.
Benati’s results
 The explicit-only information group
improved slightly from pre- to posttest
measures, but that both PI and structured
input-only groups improved much more,
and they improvement was not significantly
different from each other.
 Both treatments were significantly better
than the explicit information-only group.
 These results suggest a major if not
causative role for the structured input
activities of PI and only a minor role, if any,
for explicit information.
Conclusions
 Structured input appears to be the
causative variable in processing
instruction.
 This means that explicit information is
not important if the types of activities
learners are engaged in actually push
them to alter their processing
strategies and make more or better
form-meaning connections.
Two additional
studies
 Farley (2003)- In Farley’s study, the target
item was the subjunctive in noun clauses in
Spanish.
 Wong’s study (2003) focused on negation
of indefinite articles and partitives with
avoir in French.
 In both studies, the learners who received
structured input only, without any prior
explanation of the rule, made significant
gains.
Are the effects of PI
observable with different
assessment tasks?
 In VanPatten and Sanz (1995) the
researchers investigated the effects
of PI as measured by three kinds of
output tests.
 They compared a PI group to a
control group, using the same
materials as in VanPatten and
Cadierno.
Their output tests
 Their output tests included not only a
sentence-level test but also a questionanswer test (based on pictures) and a
video-narration test.
 They administered the output tests in two
modes: written and oral.
 In the video narration, participants must
provide all vocabulary, all syntax, and all
grammatical features on their own, without
any prompts.
Their results
 VanPatten and Sanz found that the control
group did not improve on any tests.
 The PI group improved significantly on the
interpretation test and on the sentence-level
test in both modes.
 Their gains were significant in the written
mode but just missed significance in the oral
mode.
 In all tests, the PI participants performed
better on the written tests than the oral.
 It appears that the effects of PI are observable
in a variety of output tests and are not limited
to sentence-level tests.
Are the effects of PI different
from the effects of other
types of instruction?
 Farley (2001a) compared the relative effects of
PI with the effects of “meaning-based output”
instruction (MOI).
 Farley based the PI materials on P1b of
VanPatten’s model.
 Farley’s initial activities pushed learners to
attend to subordinate clauses without main
clauses [in Spanish] and had them indicate what
the possible main clause could have been (or
vice versa).
 Farley’s activities had learners combine main
and subordinate clauses to express doubt and
belief about various people, places, and events.
MOI
 Unlike TI, MOI contains no mechanical
drills and is based on the tenets of
structured output activities that were first
mentioned in VanPatten and Cadierno
(1993).
 Participants might have heard (translated
from Spanish) “I don’t think that dogs…”
and on a sheet of paper would see “(to be)
intelligent.”
 They would then have to indicate what the
person might be saying by using the
correct verb form.
Farley’s procedure
 Both the PI and the MOI groups had two
days of instruction on the Spanish
subjunctive.
 Farley assessed outcomes using a pretest
and posttest design, with one posttest
administered one month after treatment.
 The tests consisted of an interpretation
test based on the PI materials and a
production test based on the MOI
materials.
Farley’s results
 Farley’s results differed from the results of
the previous studies comparing PI with TI.
 His results showed that the PI and MOI
groups improved significantly on both the
interpretation and the production tests,
with no difference between them.
 Thus, PI was not superior to MOI, and
neither was MOI superior to PI.
Another Farley study
 In Farley (2001b), he used the same
design, procedure, and target structure as
in his 2001a study.
 His results: Although both groups
improved on the interpretation task, only
the PI group maintained its performance
on a delayed task.
 The MOI group declined in performance.
 Thus, PI did prove to be superior to MOI in
the long run.
Do the effects of PI
hold over time?
 In the studies reported so far, the
longest time delay in administering a
posttest in any one study was four
weeks.
 As we saw with Lightbown’s 1983
study, after one year the effects of
instruction wore off and learners
were back where they had been at
the beginning.
Long-term effects of
PI
 In VanPatten and Fernández (2003),
the long-term effects of PI were
studied.
 An immediate posttest was given
after instruction, and another one
was given eight months later to the
students who had continued on to the
next semester and who had
completed all phases of study.
Results
 When VanPatten and Fernández compared
the posttest results to the pretest results,
they found that, as in all other studies, the
students improved significantly on both
measures.
 Even though the scores dropped
somewhat on the eight-month delayed test,
the students were still significantly better
at performing the tests than they were
prior to treatment.
 At least in this one study, the observed
effects of PI seem to be durable.
Guidelines for developing
structured input activities
 Present one thing at a time.
 Keep meaning in focus.
 Move from sentences to connected
discourse.
 Use both oral and written input.
 Have the learner do something with the
input.
 Keep the learner’s processing strategies in
mind.
Present one thing at
a time
 Structured input must be delivered to the
learner’s developing system in an efficient
way.
 Maximum efficiency is achieved when one
function and one form are the focus at any
given time.
 Breaking up paradigms and lists of rules if
useful for two reasons.


It allows the explicit presentation and
explanation of the grammatical structure to be
kept to a minimum.
Breaking up a paradigm is more likely to result
in attention directed toward the targeted item.
Keep meaning in
focus
 Learners should not engage in the
mechanical input activities of
traditional grammar instruction.
 Remember that input should be
attended to for its message so that
learners can see how grammar
assists in the “delivery” of that
message.
Activity:Looking for
verb endings
Check off the statements you think are
true based on what you know about
your instructor.
•He enjoys teaching.
•He enjoys watching the news at night.
•He enjoys preparing exams.
•He enjoys correcting exams.
Analysis of activity
 In the activity, the task cannot be
performed without the learner
making the form-meaning
connections.
 In order to indicate whether or not
the sentence is applicable to the
instructor, the learner must know
what the sentence means and how
the grammar encodes meaning in
each.
Move from sentences to
connected discourse
 When we teach grammar via structured
input activities, it is important to begin with
sentences first, the shorter the better.
 Shorter, isolated sentences give learners
processing time, whereas in longer
stretches of speech, grammatical form can
get lost if the demands to process meaning
overwhelm the learner.
Use both oral and
written input
 In activities, the learner should be
provided with opportunities to hear
and see the input.
 Any combination of oral and written
input within a single activity is fine.
 Although all learners need oral input,
some learners benefit from “seeing”
the language and even claim they
need to see it in order to learn it.
Keep the learner’s
processing strategies in
mind
 Learners should focus attention during
processing on the relevant grammatical
items and not on other elements of the
sentence.
 If one is teaching object pronouns in
Spanish, it does little good to have each
sentence begin with an explicit subject.
 “Target” input sentences should begin with
object pronouns, and subjects should be
implied or positioned after the verb.
Types of activities
for structured input
 Structured input activities consist of two
broad types:


Referential activities are those for which there
is a right or wrong answer and for which the
learner must rely on the targeted grammatical
form to get meaning.
Affective structured input activities are those in
which learners express an opinion, belief, or
some other affective response and are
engaged in processing information about the
real world.
Structured input activities
classified by response
type
Supplying information
Surveys
Matching
Binary options
Structured
input activities
Ordering/ranking
Selecting alternatives
Binary options
 ACTIVITY: The Typical Student
Based on your experience, determine
whether the following statements are
likely or unlikely.
1. A student who works part-time takes
more morning classes.
2. An engineering student studies more
than an art student.
Matching
 In matching activities, the learner indicates
the correspondence between an input
sentence and something else: Matching a
picture to an input sentence, etc.
 For each sentence in column A, indicate to
which activity in column B it is most
logically connected.
Associations
COLUMN A
Alice…
1. Works parttime.
COLUMN B
She…
a. Goes to the
gym.
2. Exercises five b. Studies every
times a week.
night.
Gets good
grades.
c. Earns $5.00
an hour.
Supplying
information
 In information-supplying activities that
provide structured input, learners don’t
produce the grammatical item that is being
taught but something else.
 Unless he had to, (name)….




Would never eat _______.
Would never watch ________.
Would never go to _________.
Would never spend money on ________.
Selecting
alternatives
Select the phrase that best completes each
statement about your instructor.
1. As soon as he gets home, my instructor….
a. reads the mail
b. has a cocktail.
c. plays with his dog d. something else
2. When it’s time for dinner, he…
a. prepares the meal b. helps with the meal
c. waits for the meal d. orders a pizza
Surveys
 In a survey, one or both of the
following can happen:


The learner responds to a survey item
The learner elicits survey information
from someone else.
 Surveys can use a variety of the
response formats already discussed
(binary options, supplying
information, selecting from
alternatives, and matching)
Signature searches
 Signature searches are a type of survey
activity in which learners mill around the
room attempting to find people who can
answer affirmatively to a particular
statement.
 Learners who ask questions get input
because they must read the questions and
know what they mean.
 Signature searches place input in the
hands of the learner.
Ordering and
ranking
 Another type of activity for structured
input involves having learners order items
either in terms of importance or likelihood
or in terms of chronology.
 Students are engaged in processing and
reprocessing the verb forms, all the time
connecting them to meaning as they work
through the task of this kind of activity.
Summary of chapter
 Viewed in as much detail as possible
the nature of processing information
 Examined the nature on structured
input activities and how they push
learners toward more optimal
processing of language data
 Reviewed research on processing
instruction that demonstrates in
effectiveness
Summary of
chapter 7
 Viewed in as much detail as possible the
nature of processing instruction
 Examined in particular the nature of
structured input activities and how they push
learners toward more optimal processing of
language data
 Reviewed research on processing instruction
that demonstrates its effectiveness, an
effectiveness that comes essentially from
carefully constructed activities.