VanPatten (1990) found that L2 learners of Spanish have difficulty simultaneously attending to meaning and form of aural input. This partial replication of VanPatten (1990) addresses the effect of modality on attention to meaning and form by including a written mode and by using a different L2, that is, English as a foreign language. Six tasks were used in this study: (a) listening to the passage for content only, (b) listening for content while attending to the content word inflation, (c) listening for content while attending to the definite article the, (d) reading the passage for content only, (e) reading the passage for content while attending to the content word inflation, and (f) reading for content while attending to the definite article the. Task results in the aural mode mirrored those of VanPatten's original study, but significant differences were not observed for tasks in the written mode. Furthermore, results revealed that listening was more difficult than reading, suggesting that modality is a variable that influences how learners process input. Avenues for future research are discussed.
The above article (Wong & Ito, 2017) published with multiple errors: Page 9, under the section subheading "PI training", stated that "A total of 12 sentences containing the verb faire in the causative construction and 12 sentences with the verb faire in the noncausative construction..." The sentence should read "A total of 24 sentences containing the verb faire in the causative construction and 24 sentences in the noncausative construction..." Page 10, under the section subheading "TI training", stated that "A total of 24 items were modeled after the TI treatment materials in VanPatten and Wong (2004)." The sentence should read "A total of 48 items were modeled after the TI treatment materials in VanPatten and Wong (2004)." Page 11, lines 7-8, stated that "Participants' eye movements on the screen were continuously sampled at 60 Hz by Tobii 1750 system." The sentence should read "Participants' eye movements on the screen were continuously sampled at 50 Hz by Tobii 1750 system." Page 11, line 8-9, stated that "After the pretraining eye-tracking task, participants moved to a different computer to work through the 24 training items…" The sentence should read "After the pretraining eye-tracking task, participants moved to a different computer to work through the 48 training items…" The authors apologize for these errors.
While previous research has shown that processing instruction (PI) can more effectively facilitate the acquisition of target structures than traditional drill practice, the processing mechanism of PI has not been adequately examined because most assessment tasks have been offline. Using eye-tracking, this two-experiment study compared changes in processing patterns between two types of training: PI and traditional instruction (TI) on intermediate-level L2 learners’ acquisition of the French causative. Both experiments used a pretraining/posttraining design involving a dichotomous scene selection eye-tracking task to measure eye-movement patterns and accuracy in picture selection while participants processed auditory sentences. Neither group received explicit information (EI) in Experiment 1 while both experimental groups in Experiment 2 received EI before processing sentences. Results of Experiment 1 revealed the PI group had significantly higher accuracy scores than the TI group. A change in eye-movement pattern was also observed after training for the PI group but not for the TI group. In Experiment 2, when both groups received EI, PI subjects were again significantly more accurate than TI subjects, but both groups’ accuracy scores were not reliably higher than subjects in the PI and TI groups in Experiment 1 who did not receive EI. Eye-movement patterns in Experiment 2 showed that both TI and PI started to shift their gaze to the correct picture at the same point as PI subjects did in Experiment 1. This suggests that EI helped the TI group start entertaining the correct picture as a possible response sooner but the EI did not help the PI group process the target structure sooner than the TI group.
This study investigates the effects of sentence writing (SW) on second language (L2) lexical retention by comparing two word-learning conditions: writing new words in sentences and repeated word-picture viewing. L2 learners of French and Korean attempted to learn 24 new words: 12 words with one condition and 12 words with another condition. Dependent measures were one immediate and two delayed posttests that required participants to produce target word forms. Results for both language groups revealed negative effects for SW, suggesting that SW can impede word-form learning during the initial stages of L2 vocabulary learning. Furthermore, the finding that the Korean learners' scores were much lower than the French learners' scores under the SW condition suggests that SW may result in even less retention when the L2 script is far more distant from one's first language (L1), thereby supporting the impact of L1–L2 orthographic distance on L2 word learning and retention.
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