Processing Instruction and Discourse

Alessandro G. Benati, James F. Lee

• Publisher: Continuum
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9781441140432
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Enseignement des arts du langage

Processing Instruction is an approach to grammar instruction for second language learning, contrasting with traditional grammar instruction in its focus on structured input rather than learners' output. This book compares student assessment after traditional grammar instruction and after Processing Instruction to assess the positive benefits of this method of second language teaching. Rather than examining sentence-level tasks, the study looks at the relative effectiveness of Processing Instruction on discourse-level linguistic ability. Case studies using empirical data from second language learners of Japanese, Italian and English are used to highlight the benefits to the learner of this method of enhanced input. This monograph will be of interest to postgraduates and academics researching second language acquisition and applied linguistics.

Part One
Processing Instruction: Theory, Practice, and Research

Chapter 1
VanPatten’s Theory of Input Processing

What Is Input? What Is Input Processing?

There are a variety of theories that account for different aspects of second language acquisition (Mitchell and Myles 2004; VanPatten and Williams 2007a). “Indeed, it is common ground among all theorists of language learning, of whatever description, that it is necessary to interpret and to process incoming language data in some form, for normal language development to take place. There is thus a consensus that language input of some kind is essential for normal language learning” (Mitchell and Myles 2004: 20, emphasis added). What is input? The following four definitions suffice to demonstrate that input is language, presented orally or in written form:

1. “The raw linguistic data (oral or written) to which learners are exposed” (Farley 2005: 109).

2. “Samples of language that learners are exposed to in a communicative context or setting” (Wong 2005: 119).

3. “Samples of second language that learners hear or see to which they attend for its propositional content (message)” (VanPatten 1996: 10).

4. “Input is defined as language the learner hears (or reads) and attends to for its meaning” (VanPatten and Williams 2007b: 9).

Of additional importance to our work is that input is language presented in a communicative context insofar as learners are attending to the meaning of the message(s) encoded through the language directed to them.

VanPatten and Williams (2007b: 9) assert that any theory of second language acquisition will have to address in some way certain observed phenomena, or consensus statements as Mitchell and Myles might refer to it. The first of these is that exposure to input is necessary for second language acquisition to take place. Ortega (2007: 236) reviews the role of input in the nine theories of second language acquisition included in VanPatten and Williams’ (2007a) collection of essays. She notes that the role of input in each of the theories varies. In some theories, input might be the only ingredient necessary for language acquisition but is not sufficient to account for all language acquisition, while in other theories, input may be a trigger or input may be the driving factor in learning.

What is input processing? VanPatten developed his theory of input processing and the instructional intervention called “Processing Instruction” (1993, 1996), dealt with in Chapter 2, based on what we know about what first and second language learners do with input. They process input for its meaning and that meaning is formally encoded. The term “formally” refers to the linguistic elements encoded in the input such as verb morphemes, case markings, and syntax. Input processing, then, refers to the cognitive processes by which learners make the initial connection between a grammatical form and its meaning. In our work we are concerned with how learners make sense out of the language they hear or read (input) and how they get linguistic data or intake from the input (Wong 2005: 28).

As a theoretical framework, “Input Processing is concerned with three fundamental questions that involve the assumption that an integral part of language acquisition is making form–meaning connections:

Under what conditions do learners make initial form–meaning connections?

Why, at a given moment in time, do they make some and not other form–meaning connections?

What internal strategies do learners use in comprehending sentences and how might this affect acquisition?” (VanPatten 2007: 116).

VanPatten adds to this list of three umbrella questions the following more specific ones, the answers to which are illuminated by the research on input processing:

What linguistic data do learners attend to during comprehension? Why?

What linguistic data do learners not attend to? Why?

How does a formal feature’s position in the utterance influence whether it gets processed?

What grammatical roles do learners assign to nouns based on their position in an utterance?

We are working within VanPatten’s theory of input processing as presented in its initial form in VanPatten (1996), its modified form in VanPatten (2004b), and its most recent form in VanPatten (2007). His theory of input processing in adult second language acquisition frames the research questions, methods, and procedures used in all the investigations we include in this book. It is, then, important that we begin with an explication of this theory. We draw from several sources to present our account. We draw extensively from the work of its principal theorizer (VanPatten 1996, 2000, 2004b, 2007) as well as from our own work with and within this theoretical framework (Benati and Lee 2008; Lee and Benati 2007a, 2007b, 2009).

Principle 1: The Primacy of Meaning Principle

In its current form, VanPatten’s theory consists of two overarching or organizing principles of input processing, each of which is further explicated with (sub)principles. The two overarching principles address two different aspects of processing. The first, the Primacy of Meaning Principle, asserts that when learners are engaged in communicative, meaningful interchanges, they are primarily concerned with meaning.

Principle 1. The Primacy of Meaning Principle. Learners process input for meaning before they process it for form (VanPatten 2004b: 11).

In other words, “. . . learners are driven to look for the message or communicative intent in the input” (VanPatten 2004b: 7).

To assert the primacy of meaning in input processing is to take as the point of departure that learners are primarily motivated to understand messages, be they delivered orally during an interaction or visually while reading print. If someone is talking to us, we assume they have something to say that we are meant to understand. Our task as listeners is to put forward at least an effort, if not our best effort, to understand the speaker. When we see an advertisement, for example, and read what it says, we assume that someone has something to communicate to us about a product, event, or service. There is a message that we are meant to grasp and we put forth the effort to do so. Second language learners assume the same thing; there are messages in what they hear and read and they are meant to put forward an effort to understand them. “Simply put, P1 states that learners are driven [emphasis added] to look for the message in the input (“What is this person saying to me?”) before looking for how that message is encoded” (VanPatten 1996: 17).

VanPatten derived the Primacy of Meaning Principle from research and theories in first and second language acquisition. From work on first language acquisition, he cited Peters’ (1985) operating principle that guides children during input processing. The principle states that children pay attention to utterances that have a readily identifiable meaning. For second language acquisition, he cited the work of Sharwood Smith (1986), who posited the difference between processing for communication, that is, meaning, and processing for acquisition, that is, form.

Research has repeatedly uncovered the varying conditions under which second language learners successfully make meaning from the input. Lee (1987), for example, showed that L2 learners of Spanish can extract the lexical meaning of verbs that are morphologically marked as subjunctive even though they had never been exposed to subjunctive forms in the classroom setting. They extracted meaning as successfully as a group of learners who had already been taught subjunctive forms. Lee and Rodríguez (1997) compared the effects of morphosyntactic modifications on passage comprehension. Keeping content constant, they manipulated subordination and whether that subordination required subjunctive mood or not. They found that L2 learners of Spanish comprehended the three versions of the passage equally well. Additionally, they substituted the target verbs (those that were subordinated and made into subjunctive mood forms) with nonsense words that conformed to the orthographic structure of Spanish. This substitution had no effect on passage comprehension. Manipulating both verbal and lexical forms did not affect passage comprehension because the readers’ task was to get the meaning of the text and they did.

More evidence for how learners process input for meaning before they process it for form comes from the recall data reported in Lee (2002). The learners read a passage about the future of telecommunication technologies in which the last few sentences in the passage warned of the dangers of a society increasingly dependent upon technology. The last sentence they encountered was as follows:

Text: El hombre, Homo sapiens, se convertirá en Homo electrónicus.

Translation: Man, Homo sapiens, will become Homo electrónicus.

Most learners understood the meaning of the sentence and understood its meaning in the context of the passage. Few, however, recalled and wrote the exact form of what they had seen in the text. That is, few learners wrote Homo electrónicus. Some learners produced terms such as Homo electricity and Homo erectus, which demonstrate that graphemics plays a role in recall. Others made a semantic substitution such as Homo technology and Homo technologicalus. Clearly, the semantic substitutions show us that learners processed the input for meaning before they processed it for form.

Lee and Rossomondo (2004) analyzed other elements of the input passage reported in Lee (2002) and Rossomondo (2007). The passage they used in their research targeted learners’ processing of future tense verb forms in Spanish, which are morphologically marked for person/number and tense. The morpheme –á appears in word final position. The first verb in the passage was dependerá “will depend.” Their analyses revealed that learners recalled this verb in a variety of forms. The forms varied but the meaning always centered on the idea of dependence. They noted both verbal and nominal renderings of this target verb. Among the verbal forms they found the following: will depend on, depend or depends on, rely upon, relies, and will use. Among the nominal forms they found the following: dependency, dependence upon, are dependent, and will become dependent. This variety in form shows us that learners were primarily working to get the meaning not the form.

P 1a. The Primacy of Content Words Principle: Learners process content words in the input before anything else.

VanPatten’s theory differentiates between the value of content words and function words for their contribution to meaning from the learners’ perspective and from the perspective of the push to get or make meaning. Which words are the most helpful for getting the meaning out of the input? The answer is content words, those words that represent major lexical categories as opposed to functional or minor lexical categories. VanPatten (1996: 19–20) supports the principle of content words with research by Klein (1986) and Mangubhai (1991). Klein (1986) showed that when asked to repeat utterances, early stage learners tended to repeat only the content words. Only advanced level learners could repeat the utterances correctly with content words plus functors. Mangubhai (1991) showed that learners who were being taught through Total Physical Response methodology routinely extracted the content words from the stimuli commands in order to physically respond. Carroll (2004: 299) hypothesized that “a number of distinct phonetic cues might lead learners to segment and phonologically encode words from the major lexical classes of English precisely when they are realized as prosodic words, and that would lead them not to segment and encode clitics (determiners, auxiliaries, complementizers, tense morphemes, number morphemes, etc.) This is true despite the fact that many of the functional categories express important semantic distinctions.” Her hypothesis is useful for considering why content words are attended to over function words.

In layman’s terms, we might refer to content words as the “big” words and functional words as the “little” words. Learners must bring some metalinguistic knowledge with them to the task of second language acquisition such that they can differentiate content and function words in the L2. In other words, “. . . second language learners in particular know there are ‘big words’ that can help them get the meaning of what is being said to them and their internal processors attempt to isolate these aspects of the speech stream during comprehension” (VanPatten 2004b: 8).

Other research has demonstrated the greater value of content words to second language learners. Bernhardt (1992) discussed the different text processing strategies employed by native and inexperienced nonnative readers of German. In tracking their eye movements across the lines of a text, she showed that native readers of German fixated (i.e., placed their central focal point) far more frequently than inexperienced nonnative readers did. In other words, they read more densely and intensely than the nonnative readers did. Moreover, she found that among the native readers’ more numerous fixations were those they placed on the ends of words, that is, on word final morphology. The nonnative readers tended to fixate on the centers of words, leaving word final morphology in peripheral vision. And, with their fewer in number fixations, nonnative readers tended to process content words over function words. This eye movement data is very interesting because it contrasts the approaches native and nonnative readers take to processing. Nonnative readers, the language learners, valued content words highly and valued word final morphology to a lesser degree. The eye movement evidence very directly supports the value of content words to learners.

VanPatten (1990) conducted an experiment in which he demonstrated the interplay of content words, function words, and verb morphology with comprehension. He asked learners of Spanish to listen to a short passage on inflation in Latin America and assigned the learners to one of four groups. One group listened to the passage and indicated each time they heard the word inflación, which was also the title of the passage. He termed this the content + lexical item group. Another group listened to the passage and indicated each time they heard the word la, the feminine singular form of the definite article. It occurred prior to each occurrence of the word inflación. He termed this the content + functor group. The third group listened to the passage and indicated each time they heard an n at the end of a word. This verbal inflection is the morpheme that marks third person plural in Spanish. He termed this group the content + inflection group. The fourth group simply listened to the passage and had no secondary processing task to perform; he termed this the content only group. As they listened to the passage, the three groups with simultaneous listening tasks placed a checkmark on a page for each occurrence of the target item. After listening to the passage, the learners recalled as much as they could of what they had heard. VanPatten found that listening for content alone and listening for content + lexical item were complimentary activities in that learners in both conditions comprehended equal amounts of the passage. Listening for the functor and for the verbal inflection were equally detrimental activities in that comprehension fell off significantly in these conditions.

From Bernhardt (1992), we know that learners tend not to process word final morphology and from VanPatten (1990) we know that if they are directed to process the word final morphology, they lose some of the meaning. These data support the thesis that content words are the building blocks of comprehension for second language learners. Drawing learners’ attention to noncontent elements of a passage, be they verb morphemes or definite articles, causes learners to lose some of the meaning.

We have more evidence of how...