This paper presents the results of a parallel classroom experiment investigating the effects of processing instruction, traditional instruction and meaning-based output instruction on the acquisition of the English past simple tense. The subjects involved in the present studies were Chinese and Greek school-age learners of English residing in their respective countries. The participants in both schools were divided into three groups. The first group received processing instruction; the second group was exposed to traditional instruction; the third group received meaning-based output instruction. One interpretation and one production measure were used in a pre-test and post-test design (immediate effect only). The results showed that processing instruction had positive effects on the processing and acquisition of the target feature. In both studies the processing instruction group performed better than the traditional instruction and meaning-based output instruction groups in the interpretation task and the three groups made equal gains in the production task.

I also would like to thank all the students on the Italian courses at the University of Greenwich and Queen Mary for their forbearance and assistance during the data collection and the course arrangements.

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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.