Abstract/Summary

There is broad consensus in the field of SLA that besides exposure to input, which is seen as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for L2 acquisition, a certain amount of grammar teaching is essential to achieve grammatical accuracy (Carroll, 2013). However, which approach is more likely to generate positive and lasting effects is controversial. In the current study two approaches to English grammar teaching were tested in Dutch secondary classrooms. While most research into PI investigated university level learners, the current experiment was carried out among vocational learners. The experimental group received structured input informed by Van Patten and Cadierno's (1993) Input Processing theory. In this approach, called Processing Instruction (PI), learners receive structured input activities which contain the target form (in this case past tense -ed). The experimental group was compared with a control group of learners who received traditional, output-oriented instruction (TI group). Findings of this research in which 230 young learners of English at six vocational schools in the Netherlands took part, suggest that PI was more effective in the past tense receptive tasks two weeks after the intervention. Both groups made similar substantial learning gains on the past tense productive tasks. An important secondary effect was found for the PI group in that learners outperformed the TI group in their knowledge of the present tense form, without additional training of this form. The study also offers evidence for the existence of an interface between explicit and implicit learning: at the delayed post-test stage learners were able to form past tense inflections with verbs they had not seen during the training phase.