Effects of Processing Instruction on Taiwan Junior High School Students Learning the English Superlative Construction

• Main Authors: Mengshan Wu, 吳孟珊
• Other Authors: Hui-i Kung
• Format: Others
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2010
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/37942198176661315574

碩士 === 國立彰化師範大學 === 英語學系 === 99 === Grammar instruction has played an indispensable role in the field of second language acquisition and the issues about input vs. output have been discussed by the SLA researchers. In Taiwan, though many English teachers claim that they use the communicative approach to teach English, they seem to focus on structures in the classroom. The present study aimed to investigate the effects of processing instruction (PI) on Taiwanese junior high school students learning the English superlative forms of adjectives. The participants were 58 second-year junior high school students from two mixed-level classes in central Taiwan. One class received traditional grammar instruction (TI) which focuses on the learners’ output practice and the other class received PI which focuses on the learners’ meaningful input processing. A test accessing the participants’ interpretative knowledge and productive ability of the target structure was administered to them as the pretest, the immediate posttest and the delayed posttest before, after and one month after three 45-minute classes. The results indicated that PI is as effective as TI. Both groups performed significantly better on the immediate and the delayed posttests than the pretest. No difference was in the tests as a whole. Nor were significant differences observed between the PI and the TI groups either in the interpretation task or in the production task of the two posttests. The findings suggest that PI can effectively benefit junior high school students learning this target structure and thus be used in Taiwan EFL classrooms as an alternative way to teach grammar. Key words: processing instruction, the English superlative construction