Exploring the effects of processing instruction on discourse-level interpretation tasks with the Japanese passive construction

Abstract

The findings of research investigating the effects of PI has provided unanimous support for this psycholinguistically motivated inputbased approach to grammar instruction. The research findings indicate that not only is PI an effective approach to grammar instruction, but that, in the majority of studies, it is more effective than other instructional approaches (e.g., Traditional Instruction and meaning output-based instruction). This experimental research relies quite heavily on discrete-point sentence-level interpretation and production tasks in establishing the effectiveness of PI. The research on PI is quite substantial; Lee and Benati (2009) show that it covers different languages and different language families. It addresses a variety of linguistic forms and structures thereby addressing different processing problems. It includes learners from a variety of first languages and age groups. On these grounds we can generalize the findings of PI, but we must also limit ourselves to talking about performance measures on sentence-level interpretation and sentence-level production tasks with the latter including both oral and written tasks.