Grammar Instruction and
Processing Instruction
8th November 2010
Seminar Programme: University of Oxford
Department of Education
Alessandro Benati
A.Benati@gre.ac.uk
University of Greenwich, UK
Topics of discussion
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Overview on the role of instruction in SLA
research
Input processing
Processing instruction
Empirical Evidence
New trends
Overview on the role of instruction in SLA
research
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SLA is a research field that focuses on learners and learning rather
than teachers and teaching
Gass and Selinker (2008) define second language acquisition as “the
study of how learners create a new language system”
A sub-field within SLA research emerged ‘Instructed SLA’
Unlike general SLA research, which focuses on the learner and the
development of language over time, instructed SLA focuses on the
degree to which external manipulation (e.g., instruction, learner selfdirected learning, input manipulation) can affect development in some
way (VanPatten and Benati, 2010)
One key issue in SLA is: Does instruction make a difference?
Overview on the role of instruction in SLA
research
a) Instruction is constrained
Instruction cannot alter the route of acquisition (i.e.,
acquisition orders and developmental sequences)
However, the more researchers learn about what learners do
with input and how they do it, the closer they come to
understanding the possibilities of instructional effects
b) Instruction could be beneficial
Research is investigating the conditions under which this
would be so
Overview on the role of instruction in SLA
research
Since the 1990s, researchers began to seriously examine the issue of
how learners interact with input asking questions such as:
“Why do they skip over some things in the input?” and “What makes
some features harder to process than others?”
Such questions drove researchers to examine the effects not of
instruction more generally but of particular kinds of instructional
interventions; those that were both input oriented and meaning-based
(input enhancement techniques, processing instruction and others...)
It is not clear whether these more acquisition-driven approaches to
instructional intervention actually affect SLA in any significant way, but
it is clear that the field has shifted from the more global “Does
instruction make a difference?” to the more specific:
Does manipulating input make a difference?
Input processing
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Input processing is concerned on how learners initially perceive
and process linguistic data
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In input processing, learners might encounter their first problems
in dealing with the properties of the new language
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We must come to some understanding of what input processing
looks like!!
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InputIntake
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Input is the language we hear or read
Intake refers to the linguistic data in the input that learners
attend to and hold in working memory during online
comprehension.
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Input processing
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Input provides the primary linguistic data
How learners get linguistic data from the input?
a) they are driven to get meaning while comprehending
b) they have a limited capacity for processing and storing information
c) they make use of certain universals of input processing but might
also make use of the L1 input processor (or parser)
When learners notice and process input and comprehend the message
a form-meaning connection is made
Form-meaning connection is the relationship between referential
meaning and the way it is encoded linguistically
When learners hear ‘I talked to my teacher’ and understand that ‘talked’
means that the action is in the past a form-meaning connection is made
Learners cannot just notice the form. They need to comprehend the
meaning that the form encodes!
Input processing
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Research (sentence interpretation tasks and eye tracking) on
input processing attempts to describe:
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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
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Input Processing
Input processing is concerned with those psycholinguistic
strategies and mechanisms by which learners derive intake from
input
Principle 1. The Primacy of Meaning Principle. Learners process
input for meaning before they process it for form
Sub-principle: Lexical preference principle
‘‘Yesterday I called my father’’
Principle 2. The First Noun Principle. Learners tend to process the
first noun or pronoun they encounter in a sentence as the subject or
agent.
‘‘The cow was kicked by the horse’’
Misunderstanding
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Input Processing is a model of SLA
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Input Processing discounts a role for output
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Input Processing is about pedagogy
Processing instruction
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We now have some idea of what learners are doing with input when they
are asked to comprehend it
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We can begin to develop a new kind of grammar instruction-one that will
guide and focus learners’ attention when they process input
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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
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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
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Processing instruction
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How can this approach be implemented?
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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
(always address a processing problem- correcting an inappropriate
processing strategy or instilling an appropriate processing strategy)
Structured input activities consist of two broad types:
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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
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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
Processing instruction
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Processing instruction effectively consists of two basic components:
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Learners are informed about a particular processing strategy that may
negatively affect their picking up of a form or structure during
comprehension
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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 instruction
InputIntakeDeveloping SystemOutput
Processing Strategies
Focused Practice
Processing instruction
Supplying information
Surveys
Matching
Binary options
Structured
input activities
Ordering/ranking
Selecting alternatives
Empirical Evidence
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The purpose of processing instruction is to alter how learners process input and to encourage
better form-meaning mapping that results in grammatically richer intake. This is turn should
have a positive effect on the nature of the developing system.” (VanPatten 1996: 8)
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Does it work?
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Processing instruction compared to other treatments (traditional instruction, meaning outputbased instruction…)
Processing instruction compared to its components
Structure-input enhanced
Processing instruction measured at interpretation and production sentence and discourse-level
Processing instruction immediate, medium and long-terms effects
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Main Findings (Lee and Benati, 2009):
Sentence-level and Discourse-level
Interpreting and producing
Different languages
Different processing principles
Different forms/structures
Different participants
New Trends
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Processing instruction Transfer-of-training effects (Benati and Lee, 2008)
Would learners receiving training on one type of processing strategy
transfer the use of the strategy to other forms?
Primary effects (train on a specific form and you measure the effects
on that form)
Transfer-of-training effects (train on a specific form and you measure
effects on some other forms related to that form)
3 experiments
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Italian (25 English Native)
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English (26 Korean Native)
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French (30 English Native)
English simple past (-ed-) and third person singular (-s-)
French subjunctive and imperfect
Italian future tense and noun/adjective agreement
New Trends
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pretesting + training + post-testing
primary + secondary
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interpretation + production
repeated measures ANOVA
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Time (pre-test = T1; post-test = T2)
Treatment (PI vs. TI vs. C)
New Trends
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Results:
As a result of Processing instruction training learners change the way
they work with new language data
Learners receiving Processing instruction seem to apply a particular
processing strategy to another form affected by the same processing
problem (English data-French data)
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Interpretation = PI > (TI = C)
improvement = 20%-25%
Production = PI > (TI = C)
improvement = 10%-11%
New Trends
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Learners receiving Processing
instruction seems to develop an L2
driven intuition about the way language
works (Italian data)
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Interpretation = PI > (TI = C)
improvement = 25%
Production = PI > (TI = C)
improvement = 8%