Tanja Angelovska & Alessandro Benati, University of Greenwich
The age factor: effects of processing instruction on the past simple tense
The goal of this paper is to discuss the effects of processing instruction (VanPatten, 1996) on
the acquisition of the English past simple tense (Benati, 2005) with a particular focus on the age
factor. The subjects involved in the present study are German school-age learners of English and
adult group of German students, both residing in Germany. One interpretation and one production
measure at a sentence level are used in a pre-test and post-test design (including two post-tests:
immediate and delayed effect).
Results from the Barcelona Age Factor Project show that “older learners outperformed younger
learners, especially in tests that were more academically-oriented (e.g., grammar)...” (Munoz, 2011:
116). The explanation was that older learners have cognitive advantages over younger ones and the
younger ones lack enough exposure to the target language. On the other hand, Hahn’s study (2010)
shows that students (although older learners) with no background in linguistics often lack linguistic
concepts, normally used in traditional language instruction classes. In our experiment both groups
have no background in linguistics and both receive equal input amounts of processing instruction
(PI), which forces learners to attend to the meaning of the target form without explicit attention to
form or understanding of complex linguistic terms. Hence, we can assume that the PI would have
equal effects for both younger and older learners. We hypothesize that in the long term and after
equal amounts of processing instruction among both younger and older learners, age will not be a
predictor.
Several research questions guided this study. The first one is concerned with outcome differences
depending on their age and asks how do younger and older learners instructed with the method of
processing instruction differ in the acquisition of the past simple in English. The second refers to the
long-term effects of starting age1 and asks whether younger learners will eventually reach higher
gains in the acquisition of the past simple in English than older learners, as it has been observed to
be the case in naturalistic L2 learning settings. The present study aims at answering the two
following questions:
1. Are there any differences among the two age groups regarding their performance on the
immediate post-test measuring of the interpretation and production of English past simple?
2. Are there any differences among the study groups regarding their performance on the delayed
post-test measuring of the interpretation and production of English past simple?
Keywords: age, processing instruction, grammar acquisition
1
Starting age refers to their age at the moment when the Processing Instruction (PI) was introduced to them.