processing instruction

The present study was primarily aimed at investigating how Processing instruction would affect the Iranian EFL learners’ grammatical knowledge and how the effectiveness of this method would be modulated by the learners’ individual differences in grammatical sensitivity. To this end, three senior intact high school classes were selected and randomly assigned to two experimental and one control group. Each of the experimental groups was treated with one operationalization of Processing instruction, namely, full PI (n=24), and Structured input (n=24) while the control group (n=20) received traditional output-based instruction (TI) on the English passive structure over three weekly sessions. The results illustrated that Processing instruction was more effective than TI since it improved learners’ both interpretation and production while TI only could improve learners’ production. Additionally, the results demonstrated that the positive impact of Processing instruction was not affected by the learners’ differences in grammatical sensitivity. All in all, this suggests that as long as a grammatical structure is affected by an underlying processing problem, Processing instruction is possibly a more effective pedagogical option compared to traditional output-based instruction. Furthermore, Processing instruction seems to work for all learners irrespective of their differences in terms of grammatical sensitivity.

The idea of encouraging awareness in classrooms is not new, but research into awareness is beginning to encourage those involved in language teaching to think more systematically about how language presentation facilitate language awareness. Awareness can be promoted through focus on form activities as it triggers important cognitive processes in L2 acquisition. The effectiveness of various input- and output-based focus on form instructions on the acquisition of different grammatical structures and the role of awareness in each type is a matter for debate. The present study qualitatively investigated the effects of Processing instruction, Textual enhancement, and Text editing on L2 learners’ cognitive processes and the relationship between the learners’ level of awareness and their abilities to interpret English inversion structures. To do this, learners’ think-aloud verbalizations during instruction were recorded, transcribed, and coded. Criteria to decide which level of awareness they would fall into were slightly adapted from Leow, Hsieh, and Moreno (2008) to fit with the type of tasks employed in the study. Pretest-posttests design was also employed to measure learners’ interpretive abilities. The findings indicated that each instructional technique promoted different levels of awareness and depth of processing. The findings also provided explanations for the non-significant differences in performances between the Processing instruction and Text editing groups on an immediate posttest and outperformance of the Processing instruction group on a delayed posttest. Given the benefits that Processing instruction and Text editing brought about in the present study, both might be incorporated into a curriculum and serve as complementary tools for language teachers.

The studies on the merits of processing instruction (PI) and output-based instruction (OI) have mostly treated the two approaches as mutually exclusive. To address the potentials of combining interpretation and production activities, this research compared the two isolated approaches of PI and OI with two combined approaches in which processing and output tasks were used in two opposite orders suggested by the researcher, i.e.  processing-output-based instruction (POI) and output-processing-based instruction (OPI). The target structure was English passives. Participants included 185 Iranian EFL students from five intact classes, with four assigned to each treatment and one comprising a control group. Results on sentence-level interpretation and production tests administered before, immediately after, and one month following instruction indicated similar improvement for the treatment groups on the first interpretation posttest, and the superiority of POI over OPI and PI over the delayed posttest. On the first production test, POI, OPI, and OI performed equally well and better than PI, while more accurate uses of the target form were observed by POI and OPI on the delayed posttest. It was concluded that the combined approaches, particularly POI, could produce more persistent outcomes by giving learners the opportunity to both process a form and produce it.

This research study explored the impact of learning styles and input modalities on the second language (L2) learner's input processing (IP). This study also sought to appraise the usefulness of Processing Instruction (PI) and its components in relation to the learner's learning styles and input modalities. To this end, 73 male and female Iranian EFL learners from Islamic Azad University, North Tehran Branch participated in the study. The participants from four intact classes were exposed to PI. The data were collected through a pre- test and two parallel posttests on the target structure, reconstructive elicited imitation tasks in both aural and written modes, and a structured interview. The data were analyzed using MANOVA. The findings revealed that the ectenic learners had a more form-based rather than a meaning-based approach towards IP. Input modality was also revealed to be an influential factor in L2 learner's IP. Furthermore, the Explicit Infor- mation (EI) turned out to be more of use to the ectenic learners while the synoptic group largely benefited from the Structured Input (SI) activities.

The current second language (L2) instruction research has raised great motivation for the use of both processing instruction and meaningful output instruction tasks in L2 classrooms as the two focus-on-form (FonF) instructional tasks. The present study investigated the effect of structured input tasks (represented by referential and affective tasks) compared with meaningful output tasks (implemented through text reconstruction cloze tasks) on the acquisition of English nominal clauses (NCs). The study sought to investigate if (1) both input and output instruction would lead to significant gains of knowledge in acquiring NCs, and (2) there were any significant differences between learners'' receptive and productive knowledge of nominal clauses. First-year undergraduate students studying at four intact university classrooms participated in the study. The effectiveness of the tasks was determined by a noun-clause recognition test and a sentence combination production test administered both as the pretest and posttest. The results revealed that both processing instruction and meaningful output instruction helped the learners improve their receptive knowledge of grammar effectively; nevertheless, the processing instruction group did not significantly outperform the meaningful output group in their gains of receptive knowledge of grammar. The findings further illustrated that meaningful output instruction group significantly outperformed processing instruction group in their productive knowledge of grammar.

The importance of input has been a broadly documented concept in the field of second or foreign language acquisition. However, kinds of input and ways of its presentation are among the controversial issues in L2 classroom research. Therefore, this study was designed to compare the effects of three kinds of input-based instruction on intake and acquisition of the English causative structures by Iranian EFL learners. A total of 105 university students in four intact classes were randomly assigned to four different conditions: processing instruction (PI), textual input enhancement (TE), consciousness-raising (C-R), and control (CO). A pretest/posttest (immediate and delayed) design was used, where participants’ ability to interpret and produce the target structure was assessed through administering a multiple choice interpretation test and a sentence-level production test. Moreover, a grammaticality judgment test was run to assess the amount of intake. Results revealed that learners in the PI group significantly outperformed learners in the other groups on both immediate/delayed production posttests. The findings also indicated that, C-R group could not retain the significant effect of instruction on delayed production posttest and TE tasks were not effective in improving the learners’ production of the target structure. Moreover, the PI group outperformed the other groups on grammaticality judgment test too. Based on these findings, we can conclude that PI which encompasses the most outstanding features of both focus on form and meaning instruction might be a more effective approach in helping EFL learners to acquire the target grammatical forms.