Structured input practice or enhanced structured practice?

What is structured input?

To make better form meaning connections, we manipulate the input

We structure it in ways that force learners to attend to a form and connect it with its meaning

What is enhanced input?

Typographically marked (bold, underlined, etc.)

Acoustically marked (voice raised)

Previous Research

VanPatten & Oikennon (1996) – Spanish

Object pronouns

Benati (2003) - Italian Future

Benati (2004) - Adjective agreement

Farley (2004) - Subjunctive

Wong (2004) - French negative + indefinite

article

Enhancing Structured Input

Lee and Benati. 2007. Second Language Processing. London: Continuum.

The study

Non-meaningful and redundant forms

What are the processing problems?

The redundancy of the adjective’s form

The Non-meaningfulness of gender agreement on adjectives

VP’s Processing Principles

The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle: learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical form before they process redundant meaningful forms.

The Meaning-Before-Nonmeaning Principle: learners are more likely to process meaningful grammatical forms before nonmeaningful forms irrespective of redundancy.

Target form

– Italian adjective agreement– La casa bella – - Semantic value + Redundancy

Adjective agreement

SI versus SI-E

RQ:• Do learners make greater grammatical gains on

Italian gender agreement on adjectives by performing SI activities in which the target form is enhanced compared to performing SI activities without enhanced forms as measured by an interpretation test?

• By a production test?

Design

R + PRE-POST TEST DESIGN – cut off 50%Subjects – Undergraduate – first semester – beginners - – pretest =15%- 19%– first semester beginning learners– n = 11 (SI) and 9 (SI-E)– Treatment – Two packets of Material two days (4

Hours) – No production practice – referential and affective activities (equal)– Same Teacher/facilitator

Design

SPLIT-BLOCK DESIGN

Interpretation test (describing people)– 20 items: 10 targets – 10 distracters– Scoring 1/10

Production test (short story)– 10 items; 5 masc. (-o) and 5 fem (-a)– 10 distracters (-e)– Scoring 1/0

Results

On both interpretation and production… ANOVA showed:

– No difference at pre-test level– Significant effect for Time– No significant effect for Treatment– No significant interaction

Results

Task Treatment Pretest Posttest Improve-ment

Interpre-tation

SISI-E

1.91.7

6.56.4

44%47%

Produc-tion

SISI-E

1.81.5

5.55.4

37%39%

Discussion

Both questions answered in the negative

Both groups improved equally well in both assessment measures

SI practice plays a central role

Conclusion

The study addressed the processing problem L2 learners encounter when morphology is non-meaningful and redundant

Textually/aurally enhancing SI does not cause greater improvement in learners’ performance

Enhanced SI is equally as effective as regular SI

Limitations

Size

Lack of discourse tasks and practice

Lack of delayed post-tests

Further research