Exploring the effects of Processing Instruction on Discourse-level interpretation tasks with English past tense

Abstract

The present study examines the acquisition of English, and targets as its linguistic feature the simple past tense, which is formed by adding the morpheme – d to the end of verbs. Another important feature of this study, as in the case of two previous studies investigating the effects of PI on the acquisition of English past tense, is that the L2 learners participating in this study are not native speakers of English but are native speakers of an Asian language (Benati, 2005; Benati and Lee with Houghton 2008). It is important for the generalizability of Processing Instruction to research non-Romance languages in order to further support the Target Language Hypothesis that: “PI can help learners of any target language develop an appropriate target-language specific processing strategy to address a target-language specific processing problem” (Benati and Lee, 2008: 174). It is also important for generalizability to investigate learners from a variety of native language back grounds in order to further support the Native Language Hypothesis that: “PI will be effective for instilling target-language specific processing strategies, no matter the native language of the learners” (Benati and Lee 2008: 173).