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THE EFFECTS OF PROCESSING INSTRUCTION AND TRADITIONAL INSTRUCTION ON L2 ONLINE PROCESSING OF THE CAUSATIVE CONSTRUCTION IN FRENCH

AN EYE-TRACKING STUDY

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 December 2017

Wynne Wong  and
Kiwako Ito
Wynne Wong*
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
Kiwako Ito
Affiliation:
The Ohio State University
*
*Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Wynne Wong, Department of French and Italian, The Ohio State University, 1775 College Road, #200 Hagerty Hall, Columbus, OH 43210. E-mail: [email protected]
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Abstract

While previous research has shown that processing instruction (PI) can more effectively facilitate the acquisition of target structures than traditional drill practice, the processing mechanism of PI has not been adequately examined because most assessment tasks have been offline. Using eye-tracking, this two-experiment study compared changes in processing patterns between two types of training: PI and traditional instruction (TI) on intermediate-level L2 learners’ acquisition of the French causative. Both experiments used a pretraining/posttraining design involving a dichotomous scene selection eye-tracking task to measure eye-movement patterns and accuracy in picture selection while participants processed auditory sentences. Neither group received explicit information (EI) in Experiment 1 while both experimental groups in Experiment 2 received EI before processing sentences. Results of Experiment 1 revealed the PI group had significantly higher accuracy scores than the TI group. A change in eye-movement pattern was also observed after training for the PI group but not for the TI group. In Experiment 2, when both groups received EI, PI subjects were again significantly more accurate than TI subjects, but both groups’ accuracy scores were not reliably higher than subjects in the PI and TI groups in Experiment 1 who did not receive EI. Eye-movement patterns in Experiment 2 showed that both TI and PI started to shift their gaze to the correct picture at the same point as PI subjects did in Experiment 1. This suggests that EI helped the TI group start entertaining the correct picture as a possible response sooner but the EI did not help the PI group process the target structure sooner than the TI group.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in Second Language Acquisition , Volume 40 , Issue 2 , June 2018 , pp. 241 - 268
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2017 

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Footnotes

The authors would like to thank James Brennan, Caroline Creed, Michael DeMatteo, Sarah Ewing, Laurene Glimois, and Whitney Parker for their invaluable assistance with this project. Any errors remain our own.

References

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