REEXAMINING THE ROLE OF EXPLICIT INFORMATION IN PROCESSING INSTRUCTION

The present study sought to observe, through online treatments, whether explicit information assists acquisition in a way that has not been measured in previous processing instruction (PI) studies. Two experiments examined learners' behavior while they processed Spanish sentences with object-ve...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inStudies in second language acquisition Vol. 30; no. 3; pp. 277 - 305
Main Author Fernandez, Claudia
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published New York, USA Cambridge University Press 01.09.2008
Subjects
Computers
Doctoral Dissertations
Feedback
Feedback (Response)
Form Classes (Languages)
Grammatical clauses
Information Content
Language Processing
Learning rate
Linguistic Input
Linguistics
Memory interference
Object pronouns
Predictor Variables
Pretests Posttests
Reaction Time
Researchers
Response Time
Second language acquisition
Second Language Learning
Semantics
Sentences
Spanish
Spanish as a Second Language Instruction
Spanish as a Second Language Learning
Spanish language
Studies
Subjunctive
Subjunctive mood
Syntactic Processing
Task Analysis
Teaching Methods
Verbs
Word Order
United States > US
Illinois
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Summary:The present study sought to observe, through online treatments, whether explicit information assists acquisition in a way that has not been measured in previous processing instruction (PI) studies. Two experiments examined learners' behavior while they processed Spanish sentences with object-verb-subject (OVS) word order and Spanish subjunctive under two treatments: with explicit information (the PI group) and without explicit information (the structured input [SI] group). Participants in both groups worked individually with a computer and processed a series of 30 SI items. They received feedback right after each response, and both accuracy and response time were recorded. It was expected that learners in the PI group would start to process both of the linguistic targets sooner in the sequence of input items and would submit their responses faster than learners in the SI group, because explicit information in the PI treatment would help learners notice the target items early in the series. The results showed no difference between the SI group and the PI group when processing OVS sentences, but the PI group processed subjunctive forms sooner and faster than the SI group. The results suggest that the benefits of explicit information might depend on the nature of the task and the processing problem.
Bibliography:istex:792A03886433817E03A53FB8AB35E174A6A6E66E
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PII:S0272263108080467
The findings reported here are based on my doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Illinois-Chicago in 2005. I am deeply grateful to Bill VanPatten for his guidance as my dissertation director and chairperson of my committee, and to my other committee members, Jessica Williams, Susanne Rott, Luis López-Carretero, and Susan Goldman, for their helpful advice. Many thanks are also due to Jessica Williams and Bill VanPatten for their encouragement and helpful suggestions on earlier versions of the manuscript. I also wish to thank five anonymous SSLA reviewers for their insightful and critical comments. All omissions and errors are mine.
ArticleID:08046
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ISSN:0272-2631
1470-1545
DOI:10.1017/S0272263108080467