Abstract:
The importance of input has been a broadly documented concept in the field of second or foreign language acquisition. However, kinds of input and ways of its presentation are among the controversial issues in L2 classroom research. Therefore, this study was designed to compare the effects of three kinds of input-based instruction on intake and acquisition of the English causative structures by Iranian EFL learners. A total of 105 university students in four intact classes were randomly assigned to four different conditions: processing instruction (PI), textual input enhancement (TE), consciousness-raising (C-R), and control (CO). A pretest/posttest (immediate and delayed) design was used, where participants’ ability to interpret and produce the target structure was assessed through administering a multiple choice interpretation test and a sentence-level production test. Moreover, a grammaticality judgment test was run to assess the amount of intake. Results revealed that learners in the PI group significantly outperformed learners in the other groups on both immediate/delayed production posttests. The findings also indicated that, C-R group could not retain the significant effect of instruction on delayed production posttest and TE tasks were not effective in improving the learners’ production of the target structure. Moreover, the PI group outperformed the other groups on grammaticality judgment test too. Based on these findings, we can conclude that PI which encompasses the most outstanding features of both focus on form and meaning instruction might be a more effective approach in helping EFL learners to acquire the target grammatical forms.
Machine summary:
The Effects of Processing Instruction, Consciousness-Raising Tasks, and Textual Input Enhancement on Intake and Acquisition of the English Causative Structures Manoochehr Jafarigohar Assistant Professor of TEFL, Department of Foreign Languages and Literature, Payame Noor University a Mehri Jalali PhD Candidate of TEFL, Department of Foreign Languages and literature, Payame Noor University Received 2 July 2013; revised 16 February 2014; accepted 23 February 2014 Abstract The importance of input has been a broadly documented concept in the field of second or foreign language acquisition.
In direct contrast to these conclusions; however, findings of a number of empirical studies (Morgan-Short, Sanz, Steinhauer, & Ullman, 2010) have revealed that explicit instruction is not a significant contributor to SLA and input alone is sufficient for developing learners’ interlanguage.
Given that the effectiveness of explicit or implicit instruction still remains in question, this study investigated the comparative effectiveness of three instructional treatments, namely processing instruction (PI), consciousness-raising tasks (C-R), and textual input enhancement (TE) in acquisition of the English causative structures.
Surprisingly, similar to the results of the studies in PI strand that had used TI as a grammar instruction approach (Benati, 2001), findings of this research did not show any significance difference between the mean scores of both groups on immediate / delayed production posttests.
Thus, the present study can contribute to the input-based instruction database by examining the effects of PI, C-R tasks, and TE on helping EFL learners improve their intake and acquisition of the English causatives.