Abstract
This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: Referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and Affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12-year-old Taiwanese learners of L2 English were assigned to one of four groups: Referential + Affective, Referential only, Affective only, or Control. The treatments were computer based. Pre-, post- and delayed post-tests, including a timed grammaticality judgement, a written gapfill, an oral picture narration and a short semi-structured conversation, measured learning of the -ed past tense verb inflection. Findings suggested that Referential activities were responsible for the learning gains observed, that Affective activities did not provide additional benefits in terms of learning -ed, and that the gains observed displayed some broadly defined characteristics of explicit knowledge.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 1058–1098 |
| Number of pages | 40 |
| Journal | Language Learning |
| Volume | 61 |
| Issue number | 4 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - Dec 2011 |
Keywords
- second language learning
- English learning
- grammar teaching
- langauge teaching
- Processing Instruction