Processing Instruction and a Role for Output in Second Language Acquisition

Abstract

This study addresses the role of output in second language (L2) acquisition by comparing processing instruction (PI) to communicative output (CO) tasks. Participants included 80 English-speaking adults from six university course sections of beginning L2 Spanish, with two assigned to each treatment (PI ¼ 27; CO ¼ 28) and two others comprising a control group (n ¼ 25). Instruction lasted 7 days and targeted the anticausative clitic se. One lesson was videotaped and transcribed in each treatment group. Results on grammaticality judgment and guided production tasks administered before, immediately after, and 24 days following instruction

Comparing the Effectiveness of Processing Instruction and Production-Based Instruction on L2 Grammar Learning: The Role of Explicit Information

“…Ever since VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) published their original study, a large body of research has mushroomed comparing PI to different kinds of PBI such as traditional instruction (TI; e.g., VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993), meaning-based output instruction (MOI; e.g., Farley, 2001), meaning-based drills instruction (MDI; e.g., Keating & Farley, 2008), communicative output (CO; e.g., Toth, 2006) and dictogloss tasks (DG; e.g., Qin, 2008;VanPatten, Inclezan, Salazar, & Farley, 2009). For instance, VanPatten and Cadierno's study (1993) investigated possible differences in the effectiveness of PI and TI on the acquisition of direct object pronouns in Spanish.…”

“…Not all studies in the literature, however, have found advantages of PI compared to other instructional types; this is the case for Spanish direct object pronouns and the conditional (DeKeyser & Sokalski, 1996), Spanish direct object pronouns (Keating & Farley, 2008;Morgan-Short & Bowden, 2006;Salaberry, 1997), Japanese honorifics (Nagata, 1998), French causative instruction (Allen, 2000), French direct object pronouns (Erlam, 2003), Spanish anticausative clitic se (Toth, 2006), and English present subjunctive (Farley & Aslan, 2012). All these studies, contrary to earlier PI studies, found that on the interpretation task, either the PBI and PI groups scored equally, or PBI performed better than PI; additionally, on the production task, the PBI group performed much better than PI.…”

The Effect of Input-based and Output-based Instruction on EFL Learners' Autonomy in Writing

“…The findings of the study done by Erlam et al (2009) revealed that both instructional groups significantly outperformed the control group that did not receive any instruction. Toth (2006) investigated the role of input and output in second language acquisition of Spanish morphosyntax and the results showed that both groups improved equally on a grammar task, but the output group performed better than its counterpart in a task of controlled production.…”

Language awareness and language learning

“…An ongoing issue in LA is, however, how best to stimulate and channel LA. To inform this debate, more research which contrasts the learning effects of different approaches, such as Toth (2006) and Lee (2007), would be particularly useful.…”