| This study examined the effects of two different types of instruction on the acquisition of the English wh-questions by the Korean EFL learners in middle school in South Korea. It compared traditional instruction and processing instruction. The traditional instruction was output based and was characterized by explanation of grammar rules followed by written and oral practice. The processing instruction was input based and was characterized by grammar explanation, informing the learners of their incorrect processing strategies, and structured input activities that force the learners to alter their less-thanoptimal strategies in order to make correct form-meaning connections.;A total of 78 subjects enrolled in the third grade of a Korean middle school participated in the experiment. They were randomly assigned to one of the two groups: (1) processing instruction group and (2) traditional instruction group. A distinct instructional packet was developed for both the processing instruction group and the traditional instruction group. A pretest/posttest procedure using four distinct versions of the tests was used as the means of assessing the effects of instruction. A pretest was administered before the instructional treatment and three posttests were administered immediately, two weeks, and six weeks after instruction. All tests contained: (1) sentence comprehension task (grammaticality judgment task) consisting of twenty multiple-choice test items and (2) production task consisting of ten Korean-to-English translation test items.;The findings suggest that the learners from both instructional methods had significant performance gains on both tasks and the effects of instruction were held over the three posttest sessions. Processing instruction, however, had a slight edge over traditional instruction on the sentence comprehension task and generally had significant advantages over traditional instruction on the production task. The results indicate that instruction aimed at manipulating the learners' strategies for perceiving and interpreting input seems to be more effective than traditional output-based instruction. In addition, it seems that instruction as a manipulation of input has a significant impact on the learners' developing system. Therefore, this study lends some support to previous research showing that processing instruction is superior to traditional instruction. |
