Grammar Acquisition and Processing Instruction: Secondary and Cumulative Effects
232
Grammar Acquisition and Processing Instruction: Secondary and Cumulative Effects
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Overview
Research on Processing Instruction has so far investigated the primary effects of Processing Instruction. In this book the results of a series of experimental studies investigating possible secondary and cumulative effects of Processing Instruction on the acquisition of French, Italian and English as a second language will be presented. The results of the three experiments have demonstrated that Processing Instruction not only provides learners the direct or primary benefit of learning to process and produce the morphological form on which they received instruction, but also a secondary benefit in that they transferred that training to processing and producing another morphological form on which they had received no instruction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781788920506 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Multilingual Matters Ltd. |
| Publication date: | 10/03/2008 |
| Series: | Second Language Acquisition , #34 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 232 |
| File size: | 10 MB |
About the Author
Alessandro G. Benati is Head of Languages Department at the University of Greenwich in the UK. He has researched and taught in the area of second language acquisition and processing instruction. He is co-author with James Lee of the following books: Delivering Processing Instruction in classrooms and in Virtual Contexts; Second Language Processing: An analysis of Theory, Problems and Possible Solutions.
James F. Lee is Head of Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Task and Communicating in Language Classrooms.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
A Theory of Input Processing: How Learners Work with Input
There are many theories and theoretical orientations that guide contemporary research on second language acquisition (SLA). Mitchell and Myles (2004: 2) comment that '... although the field of second language learning research has been extremely active and productive in recent decades, we have not yet arrived at a unified or comprehensive view as to how second languages are learnt'. VanPatten and Williams (2007a) ask why just one comprehensive theory to account for all of second language acquisition does not exist. Their response to the question is amusing but insightful nonetheless.
To understand [why there isn't just one theory to account for SLA], one might consider the parable about the four blind men and the elephant. These sightless men chance upon a pachyderm for the first time and one, holding its tail, says, 'Ah! The elephant is very much like a rope'. The second one has wrapped his arms around a giant leg and says, 'Ah! The elephant is like a tree'. The third has been feeling along side the elephant's massive body and says, 'Ah! The elephant is very much like a wall'. The fourth, having seized the trunk cries out, 'Ah! The elephant is very much like a snake'. For us, SLA is a big elephant that researchers can easily look at from different perspectives ... Thus, researchers have grabbed onto different parts of the elephant as a means of coming to grips with the complex phenomenon. (VanPatten & Williams, 2007a: vii–viii)
While we do not make any assertions as to which part of the elephant we are grabbing, we can assert that, as far as second language acquisition is concerned, we are working with input and examining the ways in which learners work with input. What is input? 'The raw linguistic data (oral or written) to which learners are exposed' (Farley, 2005: 109). 'Samples of language that learners are exposed to in a communicative context or setting' (Wong, 2005: 119). 'Samples of second language that learners hear or see to which they attend for its propositional content (message)' (VanPatten, 1996: 10).
We can also assert that we are working with input processing, the process by which learners make the initial connection between a grammatical form and its meaning.
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&Myles, 2004: 20)
We are working, in particular, with VanPatten's theory of input processing (VanPatten, 1996, 2000, 2002, 2004a, 2007).
VanPatten's theory of input processing in adult second language acquisition frames the research questions, methods and procedures we used in the work we present in this book. It is critical, then, that we begin with an account of this theory. We draw from several sources to present our account. We draw extensively from the work of its principal theoriser (VanPatten, 1996, 2000, 2004b, 2007) as well as fromour own work with and within this theoretical framework (Lee & Benati, 2007a, 2007b). 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)
We can add to this list of three umbrella question more specific ones that the research on input processing has attempted to delineate.
• 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?
In its current form, VanPatten's theory consists of two overarching organising principles, each of which is further explicated with sub-principles. We quote here from VanPatten (2004b: 14–18) noting and footnoting, of course, the differences in the development of some principles from 1996 to 2004b to 2007. 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. The second, The First Noun Principle, asserts that the order in which learners encounter sentence elements is a powerful factor in assigning grammatical relations amongst sentence elements. These two principles are as follows.
• Principle 1 (P1): Primacy of Meaning Principle: learners process input for meaning before they process it for form.
• Principle 2 (P2): First Noun Principle: learners tend to process the first noun or pronoun they encounter in a sentence as the subject or agent.
The Primacy of Meaning Principle is further subdivided into six subprinciples (a–f). Some of these subprinciples had previously been referred to as the corollaries of the principle (VanPatten, 1996) and some are new developments to the framework, adding as such to its explanatory adequacy. These subprinciples are meant to capture the interplay of various linguistic and cognitive features during comprehension. The subprinciples to the Primacy of Meaning Principle are as follows.
• (P1a) Primacy of Content Words Principle: learners process content words in the input before anything else.
• (P1b) Lexical Preference Principle: learners will tend to rely on lexical items as opposed to grammatical form to get meaning when both encode the same semantic information.
• (P1c) Preference for Nonredundancy Principle: learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical form before they process redundant meaningful forms.
• (P1d) Meaning-Before-Nonmeaning Principle: learners are more likely to process meaningful grammatical forms before non-meaningful forms, irrespective of redundancy.
• (P1e) Availability of Resources Principle: for learners to process either redundant meaningful grammatical forms or non-meaningful forms, the processing of overall sentential meaning must not drain available processing resources.
• (P1f) Sentence Location Principle: learners tend to process items in sentence initial position before those in final position and those in medial position.
When we listen to an utterance or read a sentence, we are presented with the linguistic elements of the sentence in a rigidly linear fashion. One sentence element precedes the next such that we must comprehend the sentence 'as it comes' to us. While regression is possible in some reading contexts, it is rarely possible in listening contexts. Research in both first and second language acquisition has found that the order of the words plays a role in comprehension and hence in language acquisition (e.g. Slobin, 1973; Lee, 2003). VanPatten's First Noun Principle captures one powerful processing strategy, that is, assigning the grammatical role of subject to the first noun encountered in an utterance. Between 1996 and 2004, we gathered more data on learners' misassignment of the first noun so that VanPatten has developed a set of subprinciples that describe factors that might attenuate learners' misuse of the first noun. The subprinciples are as follows.
• (P2a) Lexical Semantics Principle: learners may rely on lexical semantics, where possible, instead of word order to interpret sentences.
• (P2b) Event Probabilities Principle: learners may rely on event probabilities, where possible, instead of word order to interpret sentences.
• (P2c) Contextual Constraint Principle: learners may rely less on the First Noun Principle if preceding context constrains the possible interpretation of a clause or sentence. (VanPatten, 2004b: 14–18)
These principles model 'what guides learners' processing of linguistic data in the input as they are engaged in comprehension' (VanPatten, 2007: 116).We will examine each of these principles in turn and provide some of the evidence that supports them. It is important to keep in mind that learners are doing two things with the language to which they are exposed and with which they are engaged. They are making meaning and they are making form–meaning connections (Lee&VanPatten, 1995, 2003). Making meaning is comprehending, arriving at an idea of what the propositional content of the message is. Making form–meaning connections is input processing, attending to the grammatical forms/features in the input so as to connect the forms with their meanings. While related and often intertwined, these are not the same processes. Aswefurther exploreVanPatten's theory of input processing, we will see both types of processes at work.
The Push to Make Meaning
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 a billboard, for example, and read what it says, we assume that someone has something to communicate to us about a product 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 4 Grammar Acquisition and Processing Instruction saying to me?") before looking for how that message is encoded' (VanPatten, 1996: 17).
Meaning first
Research has repeatedly uncovered the varying conditions under which 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, 2003). The learners read a passage about the future of telecommunications technologies in which the last few sentences in the passage warn of the dangers of society's growing dependence on technology. The last sentence they encountered was as follows:
El hombre, Homo sapiens, se convertirá en Homo electrónicus. (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, wrote the exact form of what they had seen in the text. That is, few learners wrote Homo electrónicus. Some learners produced graphemically-based renderings such as Homo electricity and Homo erectus (the anthropological facts were not quite accurate in this 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) analysed other elements of the input passage reported on in Lee (2002, 2003) and Rossomondo (2007). The passage they used in their research targeted learners' processing of future tense verb forms in Spanish, which are morphologically marked word finally for person/number and tense. The first verb in the passage was dependerá (will depend). Lee and Rossomondo's analyses revealed that learners recalled this verb in a variety of forms. The forms varied, but the meaning always centred on the idea of dependence. They noted both verbal and nominal rendering of the target verb. Among the verbal forms they found: will depend on, depend or depends on, rely upon, relies and will use. Among the nominal forms they found dependency, dependence upon, are dependent and will become dependent. These forms show us that learners were primarily working to get the meaning not the form.
Content words
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. 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. That discussion is, however, beyond the scope of this chapter. We do, however, present several empirical works that have demonstrated the greater value of content words to second language learners.
Bernhardt (1992) discussed the different text-processing strategies employed by native and inexperienced non-native 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 non-native readers did. Because nonnative readers fixated less frequently, they did not take in as much of the text as native readers did. In other words, native readers read more densely and intensely than the non-natives did. Moreover, Bernhardt found that the native readers fixated quite frequently on the ends of words, that is, on word final morphology. The non-native readers tended to fixate on the centres of words, leaving word final morphology in peripheral vision. And, with their less numerous fixations, non-native readers tended to process content words over function words. This eye movement data is very interesting because it contrasts the approaches native and non-native readers take to processing. Non-native readers, the language learners, valued content words highly and valued word final morphology much less. The eye movement evidence very directly supports the value of content words to learners. In VanPatten (1990) we see what happens when we focus learners on word final morphology.
(Continues…)
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Copyright © 2008 Alessandro G. Benati and James F. Lee.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 A Theory of Input Processing: How Learners Work with Input
2 Processing Instruction: Research and Practice in Assessing Primary Effects
3 From Processing Instruction on the Acquisition of Italian Noun-Adjective Agreement to Secondary Transfer-of-Training Effects on Italian Future Tense Verb Morphology
4 From Processing Instruction on the Acquisition of English Past Tense to Secondary Transfer-of-Training Effects on English Third Person Singular Present Tense (with Scott Dean Houghton)
5 From Processing Instruction on the Acquisition of French Imparfait to Secondary Transfer-of-Training Effects on French Subjunctive and to Cumulative Transfer-of-Training Effects with French Causative Constructions (with Cecile Laval)
Chapter 6: Final Comments
Appendix (Sample Materials)
References
Index