| Grammar teaching has been one of the thorny issues confronting foreign language teachers and EFL/ESL specialists. With the combination and integration of various disciplines, such as Applied Linguistics, Cognitive Psychology, and Foreign Language Education, Processing Instruction(PI), a pedagogical intervention put forward based on the Input Processing Theory, has caught a number of scholars’ attention since its advent. It differs from other modes of grammar teaching in that it focuses on the first stage of information processing and aims to alter the incorrect or non-optimal strategies in which learners process input so as to promote the form-meaning connections. PI was characterized by grammatical rules explanation, informing learners of incorrect or non-optimal processing ways, and structured input activities which force learners to alter their less-than-optimal processing strategies so as to make better form-meaning mappings. Whereas the output-based Traditional Instruction(TI) was featured by presentation of grammar rules followed by output practice.Since the advent of PI, studies concerning the effects of PI have sprung up, however, received inconclusive results. Although the majority of related empirical studies proved that PI could outperform TI, some gained the opposite result. In addition, most studies in this research field applied the unitary sentence-level assessments, lacking discourse-level assessment materials. Besides, the immediate effects of PI was probed into in a range of studies, while the long-term effects drew little attention. Moreover, the bulk of studies took the university students with Romance languages as their First Language(L1) as the target subjects, which calls for more studies in relation to Chinese young learners like high school students. What is also worth noticing is that compared with the rigorous studies in recent 30 years abroad, researches involved in PI effects are much weaker at home.To make up for the limits of previous studies, the present study, combined with the Chinese foreign language teaching status quo, examined the relative instructional efficacy of PI over TI on the learning of English present perfect by Grade 2 Junior High School participants.In this study, two natural classes were randomly assigned to one of the two groups: PI group and TI group. PI group received the PI treatment while TI group was taught with TI treatment. A pretest, immediate posttest and delayed posttest procedure was implemented as the means of data collection. The scores were collected from the two types of tasks: the interpretation tasks and the production tasks in the three tests. The research data was submitted to descriptive analysis, independent-sample t-test, and paired-sample t-test with SPSS 16.0.This study found that 1) PI could enable L2 learners to comprehend the English present perfect more effectively than TI; 2) PI could enable L2 learners to produce the English present perfect as effectively as TI; 3) the advantageous effects of PI could retain over time for both the comprehending and producing of the target grammar; 4) the instructional effects of TI could only hold over time in the interpretation tasks. The result lends some support to previous studies on the effects of PI and sheds some light on the PI studies in a Chinese background. |
PDF Full Text Request