VanPatten 2002

Processing Instruction: An Update

Bill VanPattenUniversity of Illinois at Chicago

In this article I review processing instruction (PI), firstintroduced in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). I outline amodel of input processing, then describe the nature of PIitself, and follow this with a description of research to dateon PI. I also review research that offers counterevidence tothe findings of my own and others’ research and argue thatsome of these studies can be considered not as contradic-tory, but as complementary, to the research on PI, whereassome of the other studies contain drawbacks in design andprocedure that merit close scrutiny.

In VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) and VanPatten (1993) aparticular approach to instruction in grammatical form was out-lined (see also Lee & VanPatten, 1995, as well as VanPatten, 1996).Termed processing instruction (PI), this particular approach waspredicated on my previous research regarding learners’ input-processing (IP) strategies (summarized in VanPatten, 1996). Theresearch presented in VanPatten and Cadierno has been widely

Language Learning 52:4, December 2002, pp. 755–803

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I would like to thank Joe Barcroft, Alessandro Benati, Joe Collentine,Robert DeKeyser, James F. Lee, Susanne Rott, Cristina Sanz, Jessica Wil-liams, and Wynne Wong for continued discussion on processing instruction,for sharing their ideas with me, for discussing issues related to input andoutput, and/or for reading an earlier draft of this article. I would also like tothank Nick Ellis and the four anonymous reviewers for their very insightfuland useful comments on an earlier draft. They are, of course, not responsiblefor the ideas contained herein.

Correspondence concerning this article may be addressed to Bill VanPat-ten, Department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, MC-315, 601South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60601-7117. Internet: [email protected]

cited and has generated considerable discussion (see, for example,Doughty and Williams, 1998; Ellis, 1998; Jordens, 1996; and Ske-han, 1998, among others). Some subsequent research has offeredevidence as to the generalizability of the findings of VanPatten andCadierno, and some research has not.

In this article I will review the nature of PI. First I will reviewthe model of IP described in VanPatten (1996) and VanPatten(2000a) in order to provide the theoretical foundations of PI.Subsequently, I will review the nature of PI in terms of its compo-nents and purpose showing how it is informed by the model of IP.Because the VanPatten and Cadierno study has sparked consid-erable discussion in the literature and because it has served asthe basis for a number of replication studies, I will review thisstudy in detail. Subsequently I will review the replication researchon PI and will conclude that the original findings of VanPatten andCadierno are indeed generalizable to other populations and gram-matical structures. I will point out how the studies that havereported counterfindings to those of the VanPatten and Cadiernostudy, although interesting in their own right, do not necessarilyoffer evidence against the conclusions made in VanPatten andCadierno’s work. Several of the studies, I argue, can be consideredas offering complementary findings with important indications forfuture research on PI.

Input Processing

The role of input as a construct in second language acquisi-tion (SLA) is perhaps best captured by Gass (1997) in the openinglines of her book:

The concept of input is perhaps the single most importantconcept of second language acquisition. It is trivial to pointout that no individual can learn a second language withoutinput of some sort. In fact, no model of second languageacquisition does not avail itself of input in trying to explainhow learners create second language grammars. (p. 1, em-phasis added)

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What is clear from over two decades of SLA research is that it isnot sufficient to speak of input in general terms. What is necessaryis that the learning mechanisms that act upon input or interactwith it be spelled out in some fashion. One way in which this isdone is by examining IP.

One Model of IP

IP is concerned with how learners derive intake from inputregardless of the language being learned and regardless of thecontext (i.e., instructed, noninstructed). Intake is defined as thelinguistic data actually processed from the input and held inworking memory for further processing. As such, IP attempts toexplain how learners get form from input and how they parsesentences during the act of comprehension while their primaryattention is on meaning. Form in this model refers to surfacefeatures of language (e.g., functors, inflections), although IP is alsorelevant to syntax (see VanPatten, 1996, chap. 5). In VanPatten(1996, 2000a, in press) one model of IP is presented. This modelconsists of a set of principles and corollaries (listed in Table 1) thatinteract in complex ways in working memory. It is important topoint out the role of working memory in this model since the firsttwo principles are predicated on a limited capacity for processinginformation; that is, learners can do only so much in their workingmemory before attentional resources are depleted and workingmemory is forced to dump information to make room for more(incoming) information.

That learners are driven to get meaning from input (P1) hasa set of consequences, the first being that words (content lexicalitems) are searched out first since, at least in the learner’s mind,if not in any fluent speaker-listener’s, words are the principalsource of referential meaning (P1a). Of importance for the acqui-sition of grammatical form, then, is P1b. This principle holds thatwhen content lexical items and a grammatical form both encodethe same meaning and when both are present in a sentence/utterance, it is the lexical item that learners attend to for the

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meaning and not the grammatical form. The following are exam-ples from Spanish:

1. Ayer mis padres me llamaron para decirme algo importante.Here, both the lexical item ayer and the verb inflection -aronencode pastness. The learner does not have to allocate atten-tional resources to a verb form to grasp that the action tookplace before the present. At the same time, mis padres as wellas -aron encode plurality, and again the learner does not haveto allocate attentional resources to an inflection to get that thesubject is plural.

Table 1

Principles of Input Processing

P1. Learners process input for meaning before they process it for form.

P1a. Learners process content words in the input before anything else.

P1b. Learners prefer processing lexical items to grammatical items(e.g., morphology) for the same semantic information.

P1c. Learners prefer processing “more meaningful” morphology before“less” or “nonmeaningful” morphology.

P2. For learners to process form that is not meaningful, they must be ableto process informational or communicative content at no (or little) cost toattention.

P3. Learners possess a default strategy that assigns the role of agent (orsubject) to the first noun (phrase) they encounter in a sentence/utterance.This is called the first-noun strategy.

P3a. The first-noun strategy may be overridden by lexical semanticsand event probabilities.

P3b. Learners will adopt other processing strategies for grammaticalrole assignment only after their developing system has incorporatedother cues (e.g., case marking, acoustic stress).

P4. Learners process elements in sentence/utterance initial position first.

P4a. Learners process elements in final position before elements inmedial position.


2. No creo que comprenda Ramon lo que dice el profesor. Inthis example, both no creo and the -a of comprenda are relatedto mood (what textbooks call “the subjunctive of doubt” andwhat linguists might call “nonassertion” or “irrealis,” depend-ing on the framework.) The presence of No creo mitigatesagainst the processing of the –a, since the latter adds noinformation to the sentence that the learner cannot get fromthe former. (We will not repeat here the subject-verb agree-ment processing problem explicated above.)

3. Dicen que Julieta está enferma y que no viene a clase. In thisexample, the presence of enferma and the context of not comingto class will give the learner the concept of perfection (“tempo-rariness” in layperson’s terms) and mitigate the processing ofestá. Likewise, it is Julieta from which the learner gets genderand not the -a of enferma.

What these examples help to illustrate is that a great deal ofform that is meaning-oriented (i.e., is related to some semanticconcept in the real world, what I call “referential meaning”) mayalso be expressed by a lexical item or phrase elsewhere in thesentence or the discourse. This observation led me to posit theconstruct communicative value (VanPatten, 1985). Communica-tive value refers to the meaning that a form contributes to overallsentence meaning and is based on two features: [+/–inherentsemantic value] and [+/–redundancy]. A given form can have[+semantic value] and [–redundancy] (e.g., English -ing),[+semantic value] and [+redundancy] (e.g., subjunctive verb in-flections), [–semantic value] and [+redundancy] (e.g., adjectiveconcordance in Romance languages), and finally [–semantic value]and [–redundancy] (e.g., some complementizers such as that). Ingeneral, a form’s communicative value is greater if it has thecharacteristics [+semantic value/–redundancy] than if it has thecharacteristics [+semantic value/ redundancy]. In short, if mean-ing can be retrieved elsewhere and not just from the form itself,then the communicative value of the form is diminished. Formswith [–semantic value] regardless of redundancy contain no

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communicative value. In the examples above, the preterit inflec-tion -aron, the subjunctive marker -a, and the copular verb estáare all [+redundant] in that their semantic value is presentlexically somewhere else. One should note, however, that redun-dancy is not absolute; most past-tense markers do not alwaysco-occur with a temporal expression in an utterance. One mightalso hear in the input utterances such as ¿Dónde estudiaste?‘Where did you study?’ in which no lexical item provides clues totense (or to person/number). But one rarely hears the subjunctivewithout a main clause that triggers it, and one rarely hearscopular verbs without a predicate of some kind. In short, someforms are more (often) redundant than others.

The nature of communicative value, then, is important for IP:The more a form has communicative value, the more likely it is toget processed and made available in the intake data for acquisition(P1c). A form with no or consistently little communicative value isthe least likely to get processed and, without help, may never getacquired. In nonclassroom contexts (and even with many class-room learners) the absence of such forms in learner speech indi-cates that the learner has perhaps not processed them in the input(although their absence could also indicate output processingproblems, a topic beyond the scope of this article; see Pienemann,1998). Of course, low frequency in the input and other aspects oflanguage may be factors that, along with communicative value,may doom a form to never getting picked up by a learner. Likewise,the intersection of high communicative value and frequencyshould have a favorable effect on acquisition.

IP is also concerned with word order. P3, the first-nounstrategy listed in the table, may have important effects on theacquisition of a language that does not follow strict subject-verb-object (SVO) word order or on noncanonical structures in a lan-guage that does. In each of the following sentences in Spanish, thefirst noun phrase the learner encounters is not a subject, but thelearner may very well attempt to encode it as such:


(1) A Juan no le gusta esta clase mucho. ‘John does not likethis class much.’

(2) La vi yo en la fiesta anoche. ‘I saw her at the party lastnight.’

(3) Se levanta temprano. ‘He/She gets up early.’

(4) Nos faltan varios libros. ‘We are missing several books.’

Research has shown that learners do indeed encode such pronounsand noun phrases as subjects (e.g., Juan is the subject of (1), la isthe subject of (2) and means ‘she’), thus offering erroneous intakefor further processing. In this case, it is not that meaning isgotten elsewhere; it is that meaning is not gotten at all or that itis gotten wrong.

Research has led to another important processing principle,P4, that initial sentence position is more salient than final, whichin turn is more salient than medial. This means, for example, thatlearners are much more likely to pick up question words and theirsyntax than, say, object pronouns or the subjunctive.Learners maynot need to be told that Spanish inverts subject and verb in yes/noquestions because this is immediately evident in simple questionsthat learners hear from the first day of exposure (i.e., the verb isin initial position, the most salient). This kind of intake data maybe important for Universal Grammar–related aspects of acquisi-tion such as verb movement, a discussion of which is taken up indetail elsewhere (VanPatten, 1996, chap. 5) and is beyond thescope of the present article.

To summarize, research on IP attempts to describe whichlinguistic data in the input get attended to during comprehensionand which do not (or which are privileged and which are not) andwhat grammatical roles learners assign to nouns. Intake is thatsubset of filtered input that the learner actually processes andholds in working memory during on-line comprehension. Intakethus contains grammatical information as it relates to the mean-ing that learners have comprehended (or think they have compre-hended). To be sure, IP is but one set of processes related to

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acquisition; that learners derive some kind of intake from theinput does mean that the data contained in the intake automat-ically make their way into the developing mental representationof the second language (L2) in the learner’s head (i.e., intake 1acquisition). In previous work (VanPatten, 1996), accommodationof intake and restructuring are seen as processes separate fromIP. In addition, how learners access their developing system tomake output is also a distinct set of processes. (For detaileddiscussion see VanPatten, 1996, chaps. 2 and 5, and VanPatten,2000a, and the references contained therein.)

Output in SLA

So that there is no mistake, it is important to point out thata focus on IP in acquisition does not suggest there is no role foroutput (in or out of the classroom). Output may play a number ofimportant roles in language development, and in VanPatten(2000b, 2002) I show how the claims about either output orinteraction made by Gass (1997) and Swain (1998), for example,are quite compatible with a theory of IP or any theory in whichinput plays a fundamental role. Output may play a role as afocusing device that draws learners’ attention to something in theinput as mismatches are noted, and it may play a role in thedevelopment of fluency and accuracy. Both Gass and Swain, andmost other researchers as well, would agree that a role for outputin SLA does not mean that input has any less of a role to play inacquisition. Input provides the data, IP makes (certain) dataavailable for acquisition, other internal mechanisms accommo-date data into the system (often triggering some kind of restruc-turing or a change of internally generated hypotheses), and outputhelps learners become communicators and, again, may help thembecome better processors of input. This is an important point tounderscore, given that one reviewer of this article indicated thathe or she did not believe that particular claims are sustainableabout the input-to-intake sequence’s being the only one in whichrestructuring of the underlying system can occur. The point is well


taken, but the problem currently in SLA is this: Any theory thatwould suggest that acquisition does not happen as a result ofexposure to and processing of input in some way has yet toestablish what the learning mechanism is. IP, the principles andparameters framework, connectionism, the competition model,and others attempt to delimit what the learning mechanisms areor how knowledge sources interact outside of learners’ processingof raw data from the input. Pienemann (1998), working in anoutput-processing framework, is clear about this as well. Histheory is concerned with how learners develop and can use speech-processing mechanisms over time and how these mechanisms areimplicationally ordered. Because of this focus, he wishes to makeplain that he does not link output processing with acquisition inits classic sense: Processability theory, he says, “is not designed tocontribute anything to the question of the innate or learnt originof linguistic knowledge or the inferential processes by whichlinguistic input is converted into linguistic knowledge” (p. 5).Again, the point to be understood here is that in all elaboratedtheories of acquisition, input is fundamental for acquisition and isneeded for the creation of an underlying mental representation ofthe linguistic system. The point of research over the last 20 yearshas been to determine just what the links are between the devel-oping system and input. IP research is one attempt among anumber (see also Carroll, 1999).

Future research will no doubt add to the current model of IPor push for alterations in it, especially as parsing is incorporatedinto any account of IP, and the presentation of the model here hasbeen necessarily brief and without details.Nonetheless, the sketchis sufficient for discussion concerning classroom SLA and a focuson form, the subject of the next section of this article.

If learners’ IP may lead to “impoverished” intake, a logicalquestion arises: Is there a way to enrich learners’ intake usinginsights from IP? Another way to ask this question is, to whatdegree we can either manipulate learner attention during IPand/or manipulate input data so that more and better form-meaning connections are made?

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Processing Instruction: A Description

As described in VanPatten (1993, 1996) and also Lee andVanPatten (1995), PI is a type of grammar instruction or focus onform derived from the insights of IP. In this section, I describe thecharacteristics of PI and what distinguishes it from other ap-proaches to focus on form.

PI: Basic Characteristics

The most salient characteristic of PI is that it uses a particu-lar type of input to push learners away from the nonoptimalprocessing strategies described in the previous section. As such,PI is not a comprehension-based approach to language teachingsuch as total physical response, the natural approach, and so on.Since the point of PI is to assist the learner in making form-meaning connections during IP, it is more appropriate to view itas a type of focus on form or input enhancement (Sharwood Smith,1993). A secondary salient characteristic of PI is that during theinstructional phase, learners never produce the target form inquestion. This does not obviate a role for output, as noted pre-viously, since production may be useful for the development offluency and accuracy as well as of other aspects of languagedevelopment (see Lee & VanPatten, 1995, chaps. 6 and 8, andVanPatten, 2000b, for discussion). Nonetheless, during PI thelearner’s job is to process sentences and interpret them correctlywhile attending to form as well.

PI has three basic features or components:

1. Learners are given information about a linguistic form orstructure.

2. Learners are informed about a particular IP strategy thatmay negatively affect their picking up of the form or structureduring comprehension.

3. Learners are pushed to process the form or structure dur-ing activities with structured input: input that is manipulated


in particular ways so that learners become dependent on formand structure to get meaning and/or to privilege the form orstructure in the input so that learners have a better chance ofattending to it (i.e., learners are pulled away from their naturalprocessing tendencies toward more optimal tendencies).

These features of components of PI can be exemplified in thecase of the French causative with faire. The causative generallytakes the form seen in examples (5)–(6):

(5) Jean fait promener le chien à Marie.(lit., ‘John makes to walk the dog to Mary.’)‘John makes Mary walk the dog.’

(6) Mes professeurs me font travailler beaucoup.(lit., ‘My profs to me make work hard.’)‘My profs make me work hard.’

In (5), there are two verbs and two nouns. The first verb is fait,with its obligatorily preposed subject Jean. The second verb ispromener, with its underlying subject, Marie, obligatorily placedin postverbal position and marked by the preposition à. It is theunderlying subject of the second verb that is the problem forlearners of French. When asked “Who walks the dog?” learnersoverwhelmingly say “Jean,” since he is the first noun that appearsbefore the verb, thus demonstrating their reliance on P3. Whenasked to give a rough translation, learners will say the sentencemeans something like “John walks the dog for Mary.” In (6) thecausative structure is different, because the underlying subject ofthe second verb appears preverbally but not as a subject pronoun.In this case, the pronoun is an indirect object. When asked “Whoworks hard?” learners will tend to say “My professors,” once againdemonstrating reliance on P3. Their overall interpretation of thesentence is something like “My profs work hard for me.” In short,learners tend to gloss over the verb faire and process the secondverb. At the same time, they assign the first noun as subject of thesecond verb. (See MacDonald & Heilenman, 1992, as well as thepretest data in Allen, 2000, for research on L2 learners’ sentence

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processing in French.) With this in mind, a PI supplemental lessonon the causative would first begin with a brief explanation of whatthe structure is and looks like. Following this, learners would betold that it is natural to process the first noun as the subject of theverb but that this is inappropriate for this structure.Subsequentlythey would work through written and aural activities in whichthey are pushed to process sentences correctly. These activities arecalled structured input activities. Here is one example:

Activité A. Listen to each sentence. Then indicate who isperforming the action by answering each question.

1. Who cleans the room? __________________

2. Who packs the bags? ___________________

etc.

Activity A. Teacher’s script: Read each sentence once. Af-ter each sentence, ask for an answer. Do not wait until theend to review answers. Students do not repeat or otherwiseproduce the structure.

1. Claude fait nettoyer la chambre à Richard.

2. Marc fait les valises pour Jean.

etc.

The above are examples of referential structured input activi-ties. Referential activities are those for which there is a right orwrong answer and for which the learner must rely on the targetedgrammatical form to get meaning. Normally, a sequence of struc-tured input activities would begin with two or three referentialactivities. It is important to point out that in the above activities,causative structures with faire are mixed in with noncausativeswith faire (e.g., to go skiing in French is faire du ski). In this way,learners are pushed to listen to every sentence and not to apply astrategy that judges all sentences to be causative simply becausethat is the grammatical point that they are learning.

Following referential activities, learners are engaged inaffective structured input activities. These are activities inwhich learners express an opinion, belief, or some other affective


response and are engaged in processing information about the realworld. The following is an example of an affective activity thatcould follow the above referential activities:

Activité D. In this activity you will compare and contrastwhat someone gets a child to do with what someone gets adog to do. For each item, indicate whether it refers to thesmall child (à l’enfant), the dog (au chien) or possibly both(à tous les deux).

Un adulte. . .1. fait chercher l’os à/au .2. fait faire la vaisselle à/au .3. fait manger à certaine heure à/au .4. fait jouer d’hors à/au .5. fait se baigner à/au .6. fait dormir au plancher à/au .7. fait se porter bien à/au _______ s’il y a des invités.8. fait boire du lait à/au .Does everyone in class agree?

(Note that in PI there are no mechanical or nonmeaningful activi-ties. For guidelines on the creation of structured input activities,see Lee & VanPatten, 1995, chap. 5, as well as VanPatten, 1993,1996).

What Differentiates PI From Other Types of Instruction

The effects of PI have been investigated in a number ofstudies. In the next two sections, I review this research and thequestions it has addressed. Before doing so, it is important to placePI within the broader context of focus-on-form or formal instruc-tion. What is critically different about PI with respect to othertreatments that have an input orientation (e.g., textual enhance-ment, recasts, input flood) is that PI first identifies a potentiallyproblematic processing strategy from the model of IP describedin the previous section and then provides activities that pushlearners away from that strategy. In other words, PI determinesnot just what is a problem form or structure, but why it is aproblem vis-à-vis one of the learning mechanisms involved in SLA.

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To my knowledge, no other instructional treatment does this. Thereason this point is worth emphasizing is that one might concludethat PI is narrowly defined or circumscribed in such a way as tobe trivial or not useful, important points raised by two reviewersof this article. I would argue that although one could consider itnarrowly defined because of its close relationship to a model of IP,it is also a rather useful teaching device to have, since the IP modelcan be used to make predications about processing problems for awide variety of structures in different languages. For example,given the built-in redundancy of most languages, P1b would makepredictions about a variety of formal features that carry semanticinformation that is also encoded elsewhere in an utterance. P4 canbe used to examine forms in a language to determine to whatextent they are acoustically nonsalient, and P3 can be used todetermine to what extent learners would attend to case markersin languages that have them. Knowing these processing problems,then, PI activities could be constructed for a good many structuresand forms. The “narrowness” of PI, one could argue, is actually itsstrength. To me, this is important because as we move increasinglytoward technology-enhanced instruction, ideally we would likematerials with which learners can work on their own via computerthat are well-grounded in both theory and research. PI may not bethe only such approach to form-focused instruction, but its easyadaptation to technology should be clear. (Later I will review astudy that delivers PI via computer.)

As an additional point, the aim of PI is in line with claims ofthose researchers who assert that acquisition is a failure-drivenprocess (e.g., Carroll, 1999). That is, for acquisition to happen,processing mechanisms must note that the parsing procedure isnot getting the listener/learner the right information about theevents (e.g., who did what to whom) and must therefore seekalternative procedures for successful interpretation. When thesenew procedures are successful, they replace the procedures thatare not (or exist along with them). PI is designed to cause failurein interpretation at the beginning stages of activities so that theprocessors can begin to “readjust.” Because PI uses positive


evidence in the form of meaning-based utterances to which learn-ers respond, it is a type of input intervention quite unlike others.In short, PI does not manipulate the processors; it manipulatesthe input data so that the processors can do whatever it is theyneed to do to change. In this way, it is also different from the gardenpath technique, which is failure driven via output practice thatinvolves leading learners to conscious hypotheses about the targetstructure.

The Original Study

The study that launched the research agenda (and sub-sequent discussion) on PI is VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). I willreview this study in some detail because it is the most frequentlycited and has been the impetus for a number of replication studies.In this study, we set out to answer the following research ques-tions:

1. Does altering the way in which learners process input havean effect on their developmental systems?

2. If there is an effect, is it limited solely to processing moreinput or does instruction in IP also have an effect on output?

3. If there is an effect, is it the same effect that traditionalinstruction (TI) has (assuming an effect for the latter)?

We compared three groups of learners: a PI group (n = 27), aTI group (n = 26), and a control (n = 27). The PI group receivedinstruction along the lines presented earlier. The focus was wordorder and object pronouns in Spanish. Previous research (again,summarized in VanPatten, 1996) had demonstrated that learnersof Spanish misinterpret object-verb-subject (OVS) and object-verb(OV) structures as SVO and subject-verb (SV) structures, re-spectively. In Spanish, object pronouns precede finite verbs, andsubjects may be optionally deleted or may appear postverbally.Thus, learners misinterpret structures such as Lo ve María as ‘Hesees Mary’ rather than the correct ‘Mary sees him.’ In the PI

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treatment, learners first received referential activities with rightor wrong answers (e.g., “select the picture that best goes with whatyou hear”) followed by affective activities in which they offeredopinions or personal answers. At no point did the learners in thisgroup produce the structure and forms in question.

In the TI group, learners received a treatment based on themost popular Spanish college-level text at the time. The treatmentinvolved a typical explanation of object pronouns, including thecomplete paradigm of the forms, and then was followed by me-chanical, then meaningful, then communicative practices (seePaulston, 1972). At no time did this group engage in any interpre-tation activities. This particular approach to grammar instructionwas selected because it is the dominant approach to grammar inforeign language classrooms in the United States. (I will addressthe selection of TI again later.)

Both experimental treatments were balanced for tokens,vocabulary, and other factors that could affect the outcome. Inaddition, all instruction was performed by the same instructor andlasted two days. This instructor believed that there would bedifferential outcomes; that the processing group would learn tointerpret better and that the traditional group would be better atproduction (an important point to bring up given the results). Thecontrol group received no instruction on the target structure andinstead read an essay and discussed it in class.

Assessment consisted of two tests: a sentence-level interpre-tation test and a sentence-level production test. These were ad-ministered as a pretest, an immediate posttest, a 2-week delayedposttest, and a 4-week delayed posttest with various versions usedin a split-block design (e.g., if a participant received version A asthe pretest, he would receive B as the first posttest,C as the secondposttest, and D as the final posttest, whereas another participantmight receive D as the pretest, C as the first posttest, and soon). The interpretation test consisted of 10 target items and 10distracters; the production test consisted of 5 items with 5 distrac-ters. The interpretation test was based on a referential activityperformed by the processing group (e.g., “select the picture that


best goes with what you hear”), whereas the production test wasbased on an activity the traditional group performed during theirtreatment phase (e.g., “complete the sentence based on the pic-tures you see”). The items on the interpretation test were scoredas right or wrong answer for 1 point each (total = 10 points), andthe items on the production test were scored as 2 points each(2 points if correct use of object pronoun with correct word order,0 points for no object pronoun, 1 point for incorrect use of objectpronoun or problem with word order).

The results were clear. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) onthe pretests yielded no differences among the groups on the twotests prior to treatment. In the posttesting phase, the processinggroup made significant gains on the interpretation test, whereasthe traditional and control groups did not. The gain was main-tained for the month during which posttesting was conducted. Onthe production test, both the traditional and processing groupsmade significant gains but were not significantly different fromeach other. These gains were maintained over the month-longposttesting phase. The control group did not make significantgains in either area.

In terms of our research questions, we took our results tomean three things. First, altering the way learners process inputcan alter their developing systems. The processing group showedevidence of this on both interpretation and production tests.Second, the effects of PI are not limited to processing but also showup on production measures. Finally, the effects of PI are differentfrom those of TI. With PI, learners get two for one:By being pushedto process form and meaning simultaneously, they not only becameable to process better but could also access their newfound knowl-edge to produce a structure that they never produced during thetreatment phase. The traditional group made gains only on pro-duction and did not make gains in the ability to correctly processform and meaning in the input. We took these latter results tomean that the TI group learned to do a task, whereas the PI groupexperienced a change in their underlying knowledge that allowedthem to perform on different kinds of tasks.

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It is worth pointing out that at no time did our conclusionsrefer to comprehension versus production. Our final conclusionwas that instruction that was directed at intervening in learners’processing strategies should have a significant impact on thelearner’s developing system.

Questions

The VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study, like any empiricalstudy, contains limitations that suggest future research. Thesesuggestions can be articulated in a series of questions, to which Inow turn.

Are the Effects of PI Generalizable to Other Structures?

Cadierno (1995) replicated the VanPatten and Cadierno(1993) study using the Spanish preterit (past) tense as the targetstructure. This structure is morphologically complex and createsmore problems for learners in terms of form than in terms of use.Again, contrasting a control, a TI, and a PI group, Cadiernomeasured the effects of treatment via two measures: an interpre-tation test (e.g., “is the sentence you’re hearing present, past orfuture?”—note that only the verb encoded temporality; no adverbswere used) and a production test (e.g., participants had to writesentences in the past to describe a situation). Cadierno’s resultsmatched those of VanPatten and Cadierno exactly: On the inter-pretation test, the PI group improved significantly, but the othertwo groups did not. On the production test, the PI and TI groupsboth improved significantly but were not different from each other.The control group did not improve.

In her dissertation, Cheng (1995) conducted a study with serand estar, the two major copular verbs in Spanish. She compareda control, a processing, and a traditional group, with the use of thecopular verbs with adjectives as the target. Her assessmentsincluded an interpretation and production test, as in VanPattenand Cadierno (1993), but she also added a more complex test, a


written composition based on pictures. In her final analysis,Chengfocused on improvement with the verb estar, since students tendto use ser as the default (see VanPatten, 1987, and others). Herresults mirrored those of the original VanPatten and Cadiernostudy. On the interpretation test, only the processing group im-proved. On the production test, only the processing and traditionalgroups improved and were not significantly different from eachother. On the composition task, all groups improved significantly,but the processing and traditional groups’ posttest scores weresignificantly greater than those of the control group. (It is not clearwhy the control group improved at all, but their gains wereminimal, albeit enough to be different from their pretest scores.)There was no difference between the processing and traditionalgroups on the composition task.

In another study, Farley (2001a) demonstrated the effects ofPI on the Spanish subjunctive with noun clauses. He showed thatparticipants who received PI made significant gains in both inter-pretation and production abilities with the subjunctive both inform and use. (The object of Farley’s study was not to comparetraditional and PI, and we will return to the study later in anothersection. The point here is that the subjunctive is amenable to PI.)

In another dissertation, Buck (2000) investigated the relativeeffects of PI and TI in the acquisition of the present continuous(vs. the present progressive) in English by native speakers ofSpanish. Her assessment tests included the ability to correctlyinterpret sentences such as Bill is smoking a pipe and Bill smokesa pipe, as well as the ability to produce the correct structure in agiven context (e.g., “ I ___ to music every day [listen]” and “We ___the new schedule this week [prepare]”). Her results indicatedgreater gains for the processing group that were maintained overtime on the interpretation test; initial gains made by the tradi-tional group were not maintained. On the production test, bothgroups made similar gains, and the gains were maintained overtime.

In one other study, VanPatten and Wong (in press) demon-strated that PI was superior to TI with the French causative (faire

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causatif). Replicating VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) as closelyas possible,Van Patten and Wong compared a control,a processing,and a traditional group and measured outcomes with an interpre-tation and a production test. Their results were similar to those ofthe original study:On the interpretation test, the processing groupwas superior to the traditional group; the control group did notimprove. On the production test, the processing and traditionalgroups both improved significantly but were not different fromeach other. The control group did not improve. Important to pointout here is that the gains made by the processing group on theinterpretation task were not maintained over time. This is due notto a decline in performance, but to absenteeism on the finalposttest. Several participants who had made the maximum possi-ble gains on the immediate posttest were absent for the finalposttest. Given the small n sizes of this study, the “decline” wasdue to sampling problems in the final posttest.

In another study involving the acquisition of verbal morphol-ogy, Benati (2001) compared PI, TI, and a control group using theItalian future tense as the target structure.1 He included a pretest,an immediate posttest, and a 3-week delayed posttest. Each testconsisted of an interpretation task similar to Cadierno’s and atwo-part production task. The latter contained a written sentence-level task in which participants had to provide future-tense formsand an oral task in which they saw pictures and narrated asequence of events in the future. Benati’s results were similar to,but not the same as, those of the original VanPatten and Cadierno(1993) study. On the interpretation task, the PI group improvedsignificantly, the TI group did as well, and the control group didimproved somewhat. However, the gains made by the PI groupwere significantly greater compared with those of the TI group,such that the results on the interpretation task are PI > TI > C(with > indicating “better than”). On the two production tasks, thePI and TI groups both improved, with no difference between them;the control group did not improve. The improvement of the TIgroup on the interpretation task is traceable to the types ofactivities in which they engaged in the experimental treatment.


Benati points out that unlike VanPatten and Cadierno, he mini-mized the use of mechanical or purely form-oriented activities.Theeffects of a purely meaning-based nature of instruction will betaken up later when we review Farley (2001a, 2001b).

To summarize so far, the work that I have conducted collabo-ratively, in addition to the work of several other independentresearchers, offers evidence that the results of VanPatten andCadierno (1993) are generalizable to other structures and indifferent languages and at least that the effects of PI alone aregeneralizable to other structures. There is evidence for the supe-riority of PI over TI for object pronouns and word order in Spanish,for complex verbal morphology in Spanish (the preterit) andItalian (future tense), for lexical-aspectual choice (copular verbsin Spanish), for agent-dative relations and word order in French,for mood selection in subordinate clauses in Spanish, and for thepresent continuous versus the progressive in English. (Again, theFarley study did not set out to compare TI and PI.)

Since the publication of the original VanPatten and Cadierno(1993) study, several researchers have questioned the gener-alizability of that study’s results. Their questions concerned eitherthe generalizability of our findings to other structures or thegeneralizability of our finding that overall PI is superior to TI interms of treatment effects. Four studies have been published thatreport findings different from those of the original VanPatten andCadierno study, three overtly claiming to be replications and/orresponses. These studies find that there is either no superior effectfor PI compared to other instruction or that PI may produceinferior results compared with other instruction and is not gener-alizable to other structures. Borrowing several suggestions inPolio and Gass (1997), the results and conclusions of thesestudies can be considered using several questions to organize thediscussion:

1. Are these studies replications?

2. Whether they are replications or not, how might we inter-pret their findings vis-à-vis PI?

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I will review the studies first and then will return to these twoquestions.

One of the first published studies to reports results differentfrom those of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) was DeKeyser andSolkaski (1996). Using Anderson’s ACT skill theory, DeKeyser andSolkaski argue that VanPatten and Cadierno’s findings are con-tradictory to skill theory in that the processing group should havelearned only to comprehend better and that the traditional groupshould have learned to produce better. In their study, input andoutput experimental groups were compared to a control group.Thetarget items were Spanish object pronouns and word order, as inVanPatten and Cadierno, but the authors also conducted a secondexperiment with the conditional tense in Spanish. During thetreatment phase, they kept “the need for meaning as similar aspossible for the two treatment groups” (p. 625). That is, if aparticular exercise did not require a “certain attention to meaning”(p. 625), they made sure that the lack of attention to meaning waspresent in the corresponding exercises of both groups. In short,they followed the progression of mechanical to meaningful tocommunicative exercises for both experimental treatments (p.626). The explicit phase for both groups was the same. Assessmentwas made via a comprehension test and a production test, thelatter involving both translation and fill in the blank.

DeKeyser and Solkaski’s (1996) results were complex. First,for the object pronouns, they found that the input group was betteron comprehension after treatment and that the output group wasbetter on the production test.However, this difference disappearedon a delayed posttest, and even the control group was performingalmost as well as the other two groups by the time the delayedposttest was given. For the conditional, they found an overalladvantage for the output group on both tests but this advantage,too, disappeared by the time the delayed posttest was given. Whatis important to highlight here is that the input group did not dropin performance from the immediate posttest to the delayed post-test; the output group did, and this is what caused the nonsignifi-cant differences after the delay. In short, their results could be


taken to suggest that the gains made by the input group were morestable and the gains for the output group less stable (a finding inFarley, 2001b, that we will review later).

In his study on the effect of instruction on the acquisition ofobject pronouns in Spanish, Salaberry (1997) also offers counter-evidence to the results reported by VanPatten and Cadierno(1993). He compares two groups—IP and output processing—witha control. His results show no difference between the two experi-mental groups on the assessment tasks: a comprehension test(that looked just like one of his input exercises), a production test(that involved translation of sentences with object pronouns), anda narrative production test. Both experimental groups improvedsignificantly on all measures with no difference between them.

In Collentine (1998), again two types of instruction werecompared:PI and output-oriented instruction.The target item wasthe Spanish subjunctive in adjectival clauses involving indefiniteantecedents. Collentine’s PI treatment had learners match sub-junctive and indicative sentences in Spanish to correct situationsor pictures as well as having them respond to sentences containingeither subjunctive or indicative verb phrases. The output groupcompleted fill-in-the-blanks pair work in which learners had toconstruct sentences to describe something and appropriatelyselect the subjunctive or indicative as they formulated theirsentences. The explicit phase for both groups was the same.Assessment was made via an interpretation task (in which par-ticipants either heard or read a sentence and then matched it toa picture) and via a production task (fill in the blank). Before thepretest and the experimental treatments, Collentine instructedthe learners in the form of the subjunctive (but not its use), so thatmorphology of the subjunctive would not be an issue. Collentine’sresults were as follows: (a) both experimental groups improvedsignificantly after treatment (compared to a control group), and(b) there was no difference between the two experimental groups.Thus, PI was not superior to the output-oriented instruction,although Collentine’s results do show generalizability of PI effectsto other structures.

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In a study on the teaching of the French causative with faire,Allen (2000) attempts to replicate VanPatten and Cadierno (1993)by comparing PI with TI against a control group. As in VanPattenand Cadierno, she measures the effects of instruction via a sen-tence-level interpretation task (“select the picture that goes withwhat you hear”) and a sentence-level production task (“write fivesentences about what your parents make you do”). Her resultswere as follows: (a) on the interpretation task, both experimentalgroups made significant gains and were no different from eachother, and (b) on the production task, both groups made significantgains, but the traditional group was better than the processinggroup. She concludes that the results of VanPatten and Cadiernoare not generalizable to the French causative (but as in the caseof Collentine, 1998, PI effects are generalizable to the Frenchcausative irrespective of TI).

To summarize, the four studies just reviewed suggest twoconclusions: (a) that PI is not necessarily superior to TI in termsof treatment effects; and (b) that regardless of whether or not PIis superior to TI, the effects of PI alone are generalizable to otherstructures. Because the second conclusion is supportive of PI, I willturn attention to the first conclusion, which apparently runscounter to one of the major conclusions of VanPatten and Cadierno(as well as several other PI studies reviewed previously).

Returning to the questions derived from Polio and Gass(1997), we might ask, “Are these four studies replications?” Thisquestion of course leads one to ask what a replication study is.Replications are of two types. The first is an exact replicationunder the same conditions. In this situation a researcher asks, “IfI conduct X study exactly as it was done in Y place with Z people,will I get the same results?” Although exact replications are notuncommon in the sciences, they are rare if not nonexistent in SLA.So we must examine a second type of replication, a conceptualreplication:

Conceptual replications alter various features of the origi-nal study and serve the purpose of confirming the gener-alizability or external validity of the research. Researchers


will attempt replication to see if the results hold for adifferent population, in a different setting, or for a differentmodality. (Polio & Gass, p. 502)

I take this quote to mean that a researcher asks questions suchas this: “If I conduct X study exactly as it was done in Y place andwith Z people, but I change the linguistic focus from D to E, will Iget the same results?” And another question might be: ‘If I conductX study exactly as it was done in Y place with Z people, but I alterthe explicit information provided to the participants, will I get thesame results?” A conceptual replication study is one, then, thatattempts to duplicate the same treatments, procedures, and so onof a study but may alter a variable because the researcher isexamining generalizability vis-à-vis that one altered variable.Along these lines, then, Benati (2001), Cadierno (1995), Cheng(1995), Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001), VanPatten and Oikennon(1996), VanPatten and Sanz (1995), and VanPatten and Wong (inpress) are all conceptual replications of VanPatten and Cadierno(1993) because in these studies the researchers attempted toreplicate the original study by manipulating the structure, thecomponents of PI, or the assessment tasks, to see if any particularvariable would alter the previously observed outcomes.

Applying this notion of replication to the studies at hand, onecould answer that no, the four studies are not replications(Collentine, 1998, does not claim to be replicating a study in hiswork and has reiterated this in personal communication, July 20,2001, but see below). Although DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996)report their study as a replication, their primary questions werenot the same as VanPatten and Cadierno’s (1993), which I repeathere from above for the ease of the reader:

Does altering the way in which learners process input havean effect on their developing systems? If there is any effect,is it limited solely to processing more input or does instruc-tion in input processing also have an effect on output? Ifthere is an effect, is it the same effect that traditionalinstruction has (assuming an effect for the latter)?” (Van-Patten & Cadierno, 1993, p. 229, emphasis added)

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DeKeyser and Sokalski do not offer any explicitly stated researchquestions but do offer two hypotheses that imply what the ques-tions must be:

1. For the direct object clitic, after instruction the inputpractice group will improve significantly more than theoutput practice group on comprehension tasks and rivalthe output practice group on production tasks.

2. For the conditional forms of the verb, after instructionthe output practice group will improve significantly morethan the input practice group on production tasks and rivalthe input practice group on comprehension tasks. (p. 623)

What is important to note in these hypotheses is that thereis no mention of (a) altering learners’ processing strategies or (b) aprocessing group versus a traditional group. Because DeKeyserand Sokalski’s (1996) point of departure is skill theory and not atheory of IP or any theory that claims that input is critical to thedevelopment of an underlying mental representation of the lan-guage, their (implied) research questions are quite different fromVanPatten and Cadierno’s (1993). One might suspect, then, thattheir research methodology would differ as well. And it does. Theparticular instructional types they use are correctly identifed asinput and output practice (because that is what the participantswere engaged in), but the treatments were not PI and TI, respec-tively. This alone is enough to conclude that the study is not areplication of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993), and the results ofthe study should not be disregarded but should be interpretedalong other lines (see below).

Again, if we look at research questions or hypotheses, we canexamine the content of Salaberry’s (1997) study. Only the study’ssecond hypothesis is relevant to the present discussion: “H2. Theeffects of input processing instruction will be similar to theeffects of output processing instruction on all tasks” (p. 430). Atfirst blush, this hypothesis would lead one to conclude thatindeed the study replicates VanPatten and Cadierno’s (1993)study, given the use of the term “input processing.” However, theterm “output processing” leads one to wonder, since output


instruction in general cannot be equated with TI. An examinationof the treatment samples reveals that the study is not a replication,but not for the reason expected: Although the output-processinginstruction resembles TI, the IP treatment did not attempt to altera processing strategy, and Salaberry makes no mention of thisaspect of PI.2 Thus, the same treatments as those in VanPattenand Cadierno were not compared. (In addition, a number of pro-cedural and assessment variables were also not the same as inVanPatten & Cadierno’s study, further distancing this study as areplication. For discussion on this, see Sanz & VanPatten, 1998, aswell as Salaberry,1998). In a certain sense,Salaberry’s study couldbe considered more a replication of DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996).The results of his study, then, should be interpreted with respectto the results of their study.

Allen (2000) asks two research questions for her study thatare germane to the present discussion:

1. Will there be any statistical differences in how learners whoreceive PI, learners who receive TI, and learners who receiveno instruction on the French causative interpret sentencescontaining the French causative?

2. Will there be any statistical differences in how learners whoreceive PI, learners who receive TI, and learners who receiveno instruction on the French causative produce sentencescontaining the French causative?

As formulated, these research questions closely resemble those ofVanPatten and Cadierno (1993), and it appears that Allen didconduct a replication. In short, she asks the same questions buthas changed the focus to a different structure in a differentlanguage. In addition, she clearly identifies a processing problem(the first-noun strategy) and attempts to create materials to pushlearners away from the strategy. But an examination of her mate-rials reveals that her study cannot be compared directly withVanPatten and Cadierno’s because of important changes she madein treatment, procedure, and assessment. First, although Allen’s

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PI materials overall follow the guidelines for development of suchmaterials (see Lee & VanPatten, 1995; VanPatten, 1993, 1996), hertraditional materials do not follow guidelines for TI. During theexplicit phase (before any kind of practice), the TI participantsheard and interpreted 23 sentences with the French causative. Inshort, her TI materials are not pure TI materials, but a blend ofTI and PI. In addition, her PI activities do not force learners todistinguish between causative faire and noncausative faire. Thisparticular verb is very productive in French and is used to expressmany everyday events such as to clean house (faire le ménage), todo the dishes (faire la vaisselle), to ski (faire du ski), and to take atrip (faire un voyage). During the PI treatment phase, learnersheard only causative sentences and did not have to ascertainwhether or not a particular sentence was causative. Thus, onecannot be sure of what the participants were actually learning. Itis worth pointing out that in VanPatten and Cadierno, we mixedSVO and OVS/OV sentences in the materials so that learnerscould not apply some “mechanical” strategy in completing theactivities; they had to pay attention to the sentence in order todetermine which word order was being used and who did what towhom. Cadierno (1995) mixed up tenses in her referential activi-ties so that learners had to rely exclusively on the verb ending ineach sentence to determine temporal reference (past, present,future). Finally, Allen’s production assessment measure did notuse the same person and number as the interpretation test (whichis a problem because the structure is not the same for first- andthird-person sentences). (See VanPatten & Wong, in press, for morediscussion of this particular study’s design and procedure and forresults that differ from those of Allen.)

Although not claiming to be a replication study, Collentine(1998) does compare what he calls a PI group with an “output-oriented” group, with the target item being the subjunctive inSpanish in clauses representing indefinite or nonexistent antece-dents. The output group, according to Collentine, involved activi-ties that “moved from mechanical form-oriented tasks toopen-ended, communicative ones” (p. 580), a progression that


sounds very much like TI. However, unlike in other research,Collentine instructed all participants in the subjunctive form priorto the experimental period in order to familiarize them with themorphological properties of this mood. With the exception of theprior instruction on morphological form, Collentine’s study looksvery much like a replication. If we interpret “output-oriented” tomean TI based on the progression of activity types, then hisresearch questions (although directional) are similar to those ofVanPatten and Cadierno (1993): “Is PI more effective than output-oriented instruction at promoting the development of learners’abilities to interpret the subjunctive?” and “Is PI more effectivethan output-oriented instruction at promoting the development oflearners’ abilities to produce the subjunctive where necessary?”(p. 579). Collentine’s assessment measures were a sentence-levelinterpretation truth value task in which learners had to indicatewhether a sentence they heard or read correctly represented apicture they saw. The production test was a fill-in-the-blanksentence-level test. The results indicated no difference betweenthe two treatments; both groups improved (compared to a control)and on both assessment tests. However, unlike in previous re-search, the gains made were minimal. In VanPatten and Cadierno,for example, when gains were made, participants’ performanceshot up from a mean of just under or around 2 points to 8.5 or9 points out of 10. In Collentine’s results, participants’ scores onthe interpretation test went from means of around 1.5 to around4.3. They fared better in terms of gains on the production test,going from pretest means of around 0.7 to posttest means of 4.1for the PI group and 5.4 for the output group, but these gains stilldo not match those of VanPatten and Cadierno (or Cadierno, 1995,for that matter).

The question then, as before, is whether or not Collentine(1998) is a replication study. It appears to be, on all measures ofwhat a replication would be. As I examined the treatment mate-rials more closely, however, I noted two things. First, there was nodescription of the explicit information provided to the participants,and explicit attention drawn to erroneous or nonproductive

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processing strategies does not appear to be present. This may notbe a problem, given the results of VanPatten and Oikennon (1996)as well as Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001), because both of thesestudies demonstrated that the explicit information provided tolearners in essence made no difference; results seemed to be dueto the structured input activities. (These studies will be discussedbelow.) Second, the activities themselves seemed “heavy.” By thisI mean that learners had to hold a good deal of information inworking memory and process a significant amount of the L2 beforeindicating comprehension or matching a description to a sentence.These contrast sharply with the “minimal information load” ofVanPatten and Cadierno’s (1993) PI activities, in which shortsentences had to be matched to pictures or to an English equiva-lent. Also different is the absence of affective activities inCollentine’s PI materials. Participants did not respond to state-ments that related the informational content to themselves (e.g.,true for me, applies to me, I agree, and so on). I speculate here thatthese two differences in the PI materials could contribute to thePI group’s less than stellar gains between pre- and posttests in theCollentine study. If this is correct, it suggests that two aspects ofPI need to be made clearer and/or more explicit. Although allpublished guidelines for PI materials (since 1993) discuss usingboth referential and affective activities, perhaps this aspect ofactivities development needs to be strengthened, or better yet,perhaps the roles of each within PI (or any instruction, for thatmatter) need to be investigated. The “heaviness” of Collentine’sactivities leads me to consider that perhaps activities work best,especially for beginners, when they are “informationally simple”and do not require a great deal of processing of the L2 for thecompletion of each item in the activity.

The conclusion one might reach, then, is that the resultsare different in these studies from VanPatten and Cadierno(1993, and studies related to it) not because PI does not gener-alize to other structures, populations, or situations, but becausethese were not replications as understood here. Without system-atic and theoretically or methodologically motivated changes in a


study’s dependent or independent variables, its design or proce-dure, or other aspects of the study, a replication study lends itselfto differential results. Different results obtained may then be duenot to problems with the original study (or problems with thetheory on which it is based) but rather to the fact that thereplication study is either not researching the same questions asthe original study or only looks as though it is. Polio and Gass(1997) make this point when they discuss how to interpret areplication’s results when these differ from the those of the origi-nal study: “If the results are not the same . . . one needs detailedinformation on the original study to determine why. Were theoriginal results merely spurious or is there something in themethodology or subject population that differed significantly?”(p. 502). My point is that in the latter part of Polio and Gass’squestion is the reason for the differential results in the studiesunder consideration; that is, there are profound differences be-tween the methodology of the replication studies and that of theoriginal.

Although one can interpret the results of these four studiesdifferently from the interpretations of the researchers themselves,as I have done here,3 the studies nonetheless raise interestingquestions related to PI and skill development as well as possibledifficulties in teaching complex syntactic structures to early-stagelearners. I will take these questions up in a later section. I turnattention now to the issue of explicit information.

Are the Effects of PI Due to Different Explicit Information?

Another limitation of the original VanPatten and Cadierno(1993) study is that the processing and traditional groups receiveddifferent explicit information before practice. The processinggroup followed the guidelines for the PI as presented earlier:Paradigms were broken up, and participants were also warnedabout invalid processing strategies.The traditional group receiveda traditional explanation, and no mention of processing strategieswas made. Our suspicion was that the explicit information really

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did not contribute anything significant to the outcomes, so in afollow-up study we attempted to tease out explicit information asa variable.

In VanPatten and Oikennon (1996) we compared threegroups: one that received PI exactly as in the original VanPattenand Cadierno (1993) study; another that received the structuredinput activities only, with no prior explicit information and noexplanation during the activities; and another that received ex-plicit information only with no structured input activities. Thislast group received the explanation on one day, and the explana-tion was repeated on the second day (recall that treatment in theoriginal study lasted 2 days), but they engaged in reading activi-ties unrelated to the structure.

Again we used the same assessment tests as in the originalstudy. Our results were clear. Both the regular-processing groupand the structured-input-only group improved significantly butwere not different from each other. The explanation-only groupshowed no improvement at all. Our conclusion was that the effectsof PI are due not to the explicit information provided to learnersbut to the particular nature of the structured input activities andhow these push them to make form-meaning connections becausethe input sentences have been manipulated in particular ways.

A recent study using computer-assisted language learning(CALL) found similar results. Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001) setout to test whether explicit feedback, a component of CALL thatis often championed by advocates of technology in language teach-ing, is necessary or helpful to learners. They chose PI as themethod of instruction and used the same materials as VanPattenand Cadierno (1993) and VanPatten and Sanz (1995), as well asVanPatten and Oikennon (1996), but transferred them to digitalmedia and updated the drawings used in the activities and testingsections. Computer delivery of treatment and testing allowed forrandomization and control of all variables involved. They testedfour groups using the variables [+/– explanation] and [+/– explicitfeedback]. (All groups, regardless of the combination of thesevariables, received the same structured input as practice.) The


first group was [+ explanation] (i.e., explicit information about thelanguage and how to process it in the input) and [+explicit feed-back] (defined as telling learners not only whether or not ananswer is correct, but what the problem is, if the answer is notcorrect). The second group was [–explanation] and [–explicit feed-back] (i.e, they got structured input only, with only indications ofwhether their answers were right or wrong). The third group was[+explanation] but [–explicit feedback]. The fourth group was[–explanation] but [+explicit feedback]. All groups received nega-tive feedback in terms of being told whether or not their answerswere correct. Sanz and Morgan-Short’s results showed that allgroups improved significantly on the three assessment tasks(interpretation and two production tasks: a sentence completiontask and video-retelling task) from pre- to posttests (there werethree posttests, as in the original VanPatten and Cadierno [1993]study). What is more, they found that no group was better thanany other on any task. In short, neither explicit information norexplicit feedback seemed to be crucial for a change in performance;practice in decoding structured input alone (as in the secondgroup) seems to be sufficient.

Benati (in press) reports similar findings in his study withthe Italian future tense. In his study,he compared regular PI groupwith a structured-input-only group and an explicit-information-only group. His results show that the explicit-information-onlygroup improved slightly from pre- to posttest measures but thatboth PI and structured-input-only groups improved much more,and the improvement of each group was not significantly differentfrom that of the other, according to the results of his ANOVA.However, both treatment groups were significantly better than theexplicit-information-only group. These findings held for both in-terpretation and production tasks. Benati’s results then suggest amajor, if not causative, role for the structured input activities ofPI and only a minor role, if any, for explicit information.

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Are the Effects of PI Observable With Different Assessment Tasks?

Another limitation of our original study is that we usedsentence-level tests only. Cheng (1995) showed some effects for PI(as well as TI) on a composition task (reviewed above). In VanPat-ten and Sanz (1995) we set out to see what would be the effects ofPI as measured by three kinds of output tests. In this study wecompared PI group to a control group using the same materials asin VanPatten and Cadierno (1993), with the target once againobject pronouns and word order. Although we also used the inter-pretation test from VanPatten and Cadierno, our output testsincluded not only a sentence-level test but also a question-and-an-swer test (based on pictures) and a video narration test. We alsoadministered the output tests in two modes: written and oral. Wewere especially interested in the video narration task, because ofthe complex cognitive activity it represents. In this kind of task,participants must provide all vocabulary, all syntax, and all gram-matical features on their own without any prompts. We found thatthe control group did not improve on any of the tests we used. ThePI group improved significantly on the interpretation test and onthe sentence-level test in both modes (written and oral). For somereason, the participants did not attempt to produce many objectpronouns with the question-and-answer test, opting instead tosimply repeat nouns in their answers (e.g., “What’s he going to dowith the banana?” “He wants to eat the banana.” as opposed to“He wants to eat it.”) However, on the video narration test, partici-pants did attempt to produce object pronouns. Their gains weresignificant in the written mode but just missed significance in theoral mode, and on all tests, the PI participants performed betteron the written tests than on the oral.

I discussed Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001) above in terms ofthe role of explicit information. Relevant here is that the authorsincluded in their computer-oriented study the same assessmenttasks used in VanPatten and Sanz’s (1995) study. Again, theparticipants improved on all tasks, even the video retelling.


It appears that the effects of PI obtain in different types ofoutput tests and are not limited to sentence-level tests. As can beexpected, written tests produce performance superior to that oforal tests (see Sanz, 1998).

Are the Effects of PI Different From Those of Other Types ofInstruction?

Farley (2001a) compared the relative effects of PI with“meaning-based output” instruction (MOI). As in previous re-search, the PI group only interpreted sentences (via structuredinput activities) and did not produce any sentences with thesubjunctive. Farley based the PI materials on P1b of VanPatten’s(1996) model. A pilot study revealed that learners of Spanish donot pay attention to mood markers on verbs for any semanticinformation and rely instead on the lexical information containedin the main clause. Thus Farley’s referential activities pushedlearners to attend to subordinate clauses without a main clauseand had the learners indicate what the possible main clause couldhave been (or vice versa). Farley’s affective activities had learnerscombine main and subordinate clauses to express doubt and beliefabout various people, places, events, and so on or to check offbeliefs, doubts, and so on from lists.

Unlike TI, MOI includes no mechanical drills and is based onthe tenets of structured output activities proposed in Lee andVanPatten (1995) and first mentioned in VanPatten and Cadierno(1993). In Farley’s (2001a) MOI materials, participants createdsubordinate clauses using subjunctive or indicative forms basedon the main clause triggers they heard (or read). For example,participants might have heard (translated from the Spanish) “Idon’t think that dogs . . .” and on a sheet of paper would see “(tobe) intelligent.” They would then have to indicate what the personmust be saying by using the correct form of the verb in parenthe-ses. Other more affective activities had them expressing their ownbeliefs or doubts, putting them in more control of the subordinateclause.

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Both the PI and the MOI groups had 2 days of instruction onthe Spanish subjunctive with noun clauses and expressions ofdoubt and negation. Farley (2001a) assessed outcomes using apretest/posttest design, with one posttest administered 1 monthafter treatment. The tests consisted of an interpretation test basedon the PI materials (e.g, “Can you determine what the speakermust have said initially if all you hear is this second part of thesentence?” and a production test based on the MOI materials (e.g.,“Complete the sentence . . .”).

Farley’s (2001a) results differed from those in the previousstudies comparing PI with TI. His results showed that the PI andMOI groups improved significantly on both the interpretation andthe production tests, with no difference between them. Thus, PIwas not superior to MOI; neither was MOI superior to PI. Again,because this study points to a different direction for PI-orientedresearch, I will take it up again in the next section. However, it isworth pointing out here that these results also differ from anotherstudy conducted by Farley. Farley (2001b) used the same design,procedure, and target structure as the 2001a study. The results ofthe second study, however, were a bit different from those of thefirst. Although both groups improved on the interpretation task inthe second study, only the PI group maintained its performanceon a delayed task. The MOI group declined in performance, andthe decline was not traceable to a sampling problem similar to thatfound in the VanPatten and Wong (in press) study. Thus, PI didprove to be superior to TI in the same way it did in the Buck (2000)study.

Summary

In general, it seems that the conclusions of VanPatten andCadierno (1993) hold overall, namely, that PI is superior to TI. Intwo studies in which we see an initial gain on interpretation tasksfor the TI group or the MOI group, the gains were lost by the timea delayed posttest was administered, whereas this was not thecase for the PI groups (accounting for the attrition problem in the


VanPatten & Wong, in press, study). We also see generalizabilityto other structures, that a causative role of explicit information inPI is minimal if any, and that the effects of PI show up on a varietyof assessment tasks. I have argued that replication studies report-ing counterevidence can be reinterpreted if we take a close look atthe differences in methodology between them and the originalstudy. We also, see, however that the question of PI’s being overallsuperior to a completely meaning-based approach to output-oriented instruction (Farley’s MOI) resulted in conflicting findingscalling for more research on this issue. I now turn attention tosome remaining issues.

Remaining Issues

One of the issues in PI research that has been ignored to dateis that of skill development. Although I argued earlier that theconclusions of DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996) could not be appliedto PI, their findings are quite important for supporting the ideathat skills develop when skills are practiced. Theories in SLA thatdeal with the development of an interlanguage grammar or un-derlying mental representation often have little if anything to sayabout how learners go about making productive use of thosegrammars (a point underscored in Pienemann’s research). Withthis said, one aspect of the VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) studythat needs to be made clear is that it used only accuracy measuresto determine any effects due to treatment. Since no measures ofresponse or reaction time were used, we cannot determine to whatextent there were differential outcomes among the groups regard-ing accuracy and speed, the two underlying components of skilldevelopment (Schmidt, 1992). The PI group might have been ableto produce a structure but produced it more slowly than the TIgroup; or they might have had faster response times on theinterpretation task and slower times on the production task, afinding that would reflect the absence of skill development. Inshort, we know that the PI participants could access a form orstructure, but we have no idea about how this might translate

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ultimately into fluency and accuracy during “normal” speech.However, given the research questions and framework in whichwe operated, we did not need such measures, and our conclusionsreflect this:

What seems to have happened in this study is thatprocessing instruction altered the way in which the sub-jects processed input, which in turn had an effect on thedeveloping system and what the subjects could access forproduction. (Van Patten & Cadierno,1993,p.238,emphasisadded)

Instruction as direct intervention on learners’ strategiesin input processing should have a significant effect on thelearner’s developing system. The results of the presentstudy suggest that this is so. (p. 240, emphasis added)

We do not advocate abandoning communicative tasks andtasks that provide opportunities for making output. . . . [I]tis clear that learners need to develop their abilities inaccessing the developing system for fluent and accurateproduction. (p. 239, emphasis added)

One could look at the original VanPatten and Cadierno (1993)study juxtaposed to the DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996) study, forexample, and reasonably say, “I understand how PI could alter thelearner’s mental representation of the grammar, but I don’t seehow PI could address anything related to fluency and the devel-opment of oral skills.” This view, I would argue, is valid. Futureresearch should incorporate reaction time measures when inves-tigating the effects of instruction. Subtle yet important differencesbetween groups might surface with these measures that do notsurface with simple accuracy measures.

On a different issue, an anonymous reviewer of this articleraised the following question: Could it be that some of the replica-tion studies with different results conformed to some earlierconceptualization of PI? Put in other words, the counterevidencestudies claiming to be replications might not be faulted on meth-odological grounds, because the concept of PI has evolved sinceVanPatten and Cadierno’s original (1993) study, and thus we are


using a more developed, more elaborated, or even changed concep-tualization of PI now than what these researchers had to follow.This query seems reasonable,until one is reminded of three points.The first of these points involves the research questions asked bythe various studies. As we saw above, two of the three replicationstudies were not actually answering the same questions asVanPatten and Cadierno, so they really didn’t have to followVanPatten and Cadierno’s treatments and design faithfully. Thatthey are reported as replications is unfortunate and obscures thispoint as well as the important findings they offer on other matters.

The second point is that the essence of PI is found inVanPatten and Cadierno’s (1993) question about altering learners’processing strategies. Our hypothesis was that if we altered aninvalid or misleading strategy by pushing learners to processinput correctly, we would get a change in the learner’s grammar.We operationalized this via PI, which is an interventionist treat-ment that seeks to alter the way in which learners process a formor structure in the input. In fact, what has always distinguishedPI from any other approach to instruction is its foundation in atheory of IP. From IP we find out what learners are doing wrongor not at all; that is, we find out their processing strategies. Wethen relate these strategies to formal features of language to seewhat formal features might be affected by which strategies. Wesubsequently design an appropriate pedagogical intervention. Asstated in VanPatten and Cadierno, “Processing instruction, on theother hand, involved (a) teaching the subjects how to process OVSstrings correctly, both when the O consisted of a full noun andwhen it consisted of a clitic object pronoun, and (b) having thestudents respond to the informational content of OV(S) strings”(p. 231; see also the activity type descriptions therein). Withoutthis critical aspect of the intervention, it is fair to say that otherstudies use an input-oriented treatment, but one that is not PI.

Most important, however, is the third point. Even if thetreatment descriptions in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) weresufficiently vague as to make replication not possible, VanPatten(1993) articulates the fundamentals of PI, which have not changed

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since that study was published (see also Lee and VanPatten, 1995;VanPatten, 1996). These fundamentals include those describedearlier (explicit information about the structure, explicit informa-tion about processing strategies, structured input activities, bothreferential and affective) in addition to a set of guidelines fordeveloping structured input activities that includes the followingguideline: “Keep the learners’ processing strategies in mind.”What has changed over the years is the elaboration and exempli-fication of these fundamentals, mostly because we have realizedfrom our working with new instructors and from reading theresearch that the profession needed more examples, needed exam-ples from different languages, and needed to understand espe-cially what we meant by altering learners’ processing strategies,a point that we find continues to escape many. But PI itself hasnot changed.

Turning our attention to a different issue, another reviewerof this article suggested that VanPatten and Cadierno (1993)confounded input with PI and output with TI, and therefore it isonly reasonable to expect that attempts at replication would referto input versus output practice. In short, the confusion is causedby our conflation of constructs (PI with input and TI with output).This may be a valid point in that one could ask, “Why did you pickTI? Why didn’t you pick some other kind of output instruction?”My response is this: We used TI because that is the dominantgrammar instruction type used in foreign language instruction inthe United States, if not around the world. (The teaching ofEnglish as a second language most likely is much more meaning-oriented than either English as a foreign language or foreignlanguage teaching in this country, as pointed out by a reviewer ofanother article.) Cadierno and I examined 10 major Spanishtextbooks before conducting our study, and only one did not employthe methodology of TI in its treatment of grammar. And thesituation has not changed. Only recently my coauthor on anotherarticle,Wynne Wong,and I sat in on separate workshops at differentinstitutions during which language teaching professionals in-formed first-time graduate teaching assistants that explanation


and (mechanical) drills were necessary for language acquisition.And in the 10 years that I have been invited to language depart-ments and regional conferences and have talked about PI, I haveoften received terribly concerned looks from practicing teachersand some language program directors accompanied by the ques-tion, “But don’t they need to do some drill to get the structureunder control?” TI, then, as conceptualized and operationalized inour studies, is no straw man; it is alive and well in a tremendousnumber of language classes and textbooks in the United States ifnot elsewhere.

Our point, then, was not to contrast input with output, but toquestion the dominant approach and contrast it with another thatwas grounded in theoretical constructs of SLA (input and IP). Forthis reason we have stood by our original claim that PI is betterthan TI. We have never claimed that input is better than outputin general, nor that output plays no role in SLA. Indeed, we haveunderscored the need for output practice and for self-expressionduring communicative activities, as some of the quotations earlierin this section demonstrate. (Again, see VanPatten, 2000b and2002, for more discussion on the roles of input and output in SLA.)It is true that in our original study we criticized TI for puttingthe cart before the horse, that is, for being an instructional ap-proach that attempted to manipulate output, and we did questioninstructional approaches in general that attempt to manipulateoutput as a means to “alter the nature of the developing system”(VanPatten and Cadierno,1993,p.227). It is understandable, then,that some readers might think that we were researching inputversus output. What is less understandable is maintaining thisinterpretation after reading our discussion and conclusion, unlessone liberally interprets TI as meaning any kind of output-basedinstruction or PI as any kind of input-based instruction. Thisreading of the treatments was clearly not our intention.

Because of space limitations, it is not possible to treat fullyhere the roles of input and output in SLA. I have attempted to dothis in VanPatten (2002). It is important to mention at least inpassing that perhaps the question is not really input versus

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output, but rather our assumptions about SLA in general. Forexample, my assumption is that SLA is special and not like otherkinds of learning and that the result of SLA is an implicit systemconsisting of a network of lexical items and forms as well as anabstract system of constraints on syntax. (I make no assumptionsabout phonology or other aspects of the linguistic system.) It is notclear, except in the case of DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996), whatassumptions underlie the claims of those who do not believe in afundamental role for input in SLA or that SLA is different fromother kinds of learning. For DeKeyser and Sokalski, SLA is notspecial and is subject to the “laws” of any kind of human skilllearning. For me and for those who agree with my conceptualiza-tion of the underlying system, input provides the raw data uponwhich internal mechanisms act. For DeKeyser and Sokalski, forexample, input is necessary only for the development of compre-hension skills; there is no underlying system, but rather sets ofprocedural knowledge, one for comprehension and one for produc-tion. If this reading is correct, then the debate is not about inputversus output in SLA (instructed or otherwise), but about anunderlying system versus skills (or something else).

Before concluding I would like to return to the Farley studies(2001a, 2001b), since they clearly set out to test the effects of PIagainst a completely meaning-based output-oriented instructionand thus speak to issues beyond PI versus TI. Farley’s results, asreported above, do not parallel those of VanPatten and Cadierno(1993). In Farley (2001a), both groups improved after treatment,and both improved on the two different assessments: sentence-level interpretation and sentence-level production. In Farley(2001b), both groups improved on both measures, but the MOIgroup’s performance declined over time on the interpretation task,whereas the PI group showed no decline. This leaves us without aclear statement to make regarding the “equal” effects of PI andMOI. But for the sake of argument, I will assume that the effectsof PI and MOI are essentially the same (i.e., the results of Farley’s2001a study). Again, without reaction times to examine possibledifferential effects in speed on the tests, it is difficult to make


conclusions about PI versus MOI. Perhaps more important,though, is an aspect of the study that Farley addresses quiteclearly as a limitation. Since he sought ecological validity, heconducted the research in classrooms (as is done in most PIstudies) rather than in a laboratory setting. As a result, althoughthe PI group was a pure input group, the MOI group was not. Eachand every time a participant uttered a sentence, including theinstructor, it served as potential input for others in the classroom.(One of the tenets of structured output, the concept on whichFarley based his output materials, is that someone must respondto the content of the learner’s output so that an emphasis onmeaning is maintained and the learner is not producing for thesake of producing.See Lee and VanPatten,1995, chap.6.) AlthoughFarley did not analyze the output, based on the activities the MOIgroup was performing, their output sentences would have oftenlooked like structured input sentences in the PI group. Similarlyto Allen’s (2000) study, then, the MOI was a mixture of input andoutput. Farley himself suggests that his results are due to whathe calls the “incidental input” of the MOI group. For the samereasons, his results are different from those of studies in which mycolleagues and I have used TI. With TI there is no incidental input(or very little) because of the types of practices used (except in thecase of the Benati [2001] study, in which the author decreased thenumber of mechanically oriented activities and added others thatresemble structured output activities). Farley’s explanation of theperformance of the MOI group may seem ad hoc to some readers,but what makes it reasonable is that it (a) considers what isactually happening in the classroom in terms of the linguisticenvironment and (b) links the results to the very way in whichSLA theory and research have suggested that learning happens,by way of input. If the MOI class periods were more communicativethan typical TI equivalents and if this communication was builtaround a particular structure, then these class periods must befostering acquisition in some way, as the language produced in theclassroom is potential input for learners.

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A contrasting and also reasonable conclusion of Farley’s(2001a) study is that since both the PI and the MOI groups weremeaning-based throughout the treatment phase, perhaps it is themeaning-oriented nature of instruction that is most important. Aslong as classes and materials are meaning-oriented and avoidmechanical and display language, acquisition is fostered, and PIis no better than any other meaning-based instruction with a formfocus. I would not disagree with this statement at all, at least asfar as one of the Farley studies is concerned. I would add a caveat,however: that PI appears (so far!) almost to guarantee some kindof positive effect. This cannot be said about other meaning-basedapproaches. They simply need to be researched (and replicationsdone, of course, as Farley clearly shows in his own work). I offerhere a case in point. Text enhancement is a meaning-based ap-proach to focus on form with an input orientation. In text enhance-ment, a targeted form is highlighted throughout a written text tomake it more salient. Learners read for meaning, and as they doso they should notice the highlighted forms as well. The results ofthis technique are mixed, if not disappointing, as demonstrated inresults and the literature review in one recent dissertation (Wong,2000). And in one case (Overstreet, 1998) it was found that textenhancement interfered with comprehension, which would sug-gest that the meaning-oriented nature of the treatment was beingcompromised by the focus on form, precisely what we don’t wantin acquisition. In acquisition, an important job of the learner is tomake form-meaning connections in the input.

As one last point, I would like to return to the Collentine(1998) and Farley (2001a, 200b) studies. I remind the reader thatCollentine’s study does appear to be a replication with differentresults from previous research. I concluded above that the typesof materials used in the PI treatment suggest a need to clarifywhat constitutes “good” activities for beginning learners in termsof processing load. But the results of one of Farley’s studies (2001a)are similar to Collentine’s, and the PI materials are very similarto those used in previous research. What these two studies havein common is the linguistic structure, the Spanish subjunctive


(albeit different uses of the subjunctive). It may be that thesuperiority of PI to TI is not generalizable to this particularstructure. By the same token, the constant superiority of PI overTI with a number of other structures and forms and in differentlanguages leaves us begging the question “Why?” Collentine (inpress) suggests that the “stubbornness” of the subjunctive may bedue to syntactic development. Not only are learners acquiringmood (a semantic notion) and the formal means by which it isconveyed, but they are also learning how to process clauses ininput as well as output. We have seen in research on German L2,for example, that word order in clauses is acquired in the lastphase of acquisition of word order in general (see Pienemann,1998, and others), and in the research on the acquisition of wh-questions in English, it is known that word order in embeddedquestions (e.g., Did you tell me why Mary is late?) comes late.Before engaging in such speculation about the difficulties of thesubjunctive, it would prove useful first to investigate whether anyother type of instruction leads to any higher levels of improvementwith this structure. With that kind of research in hand, we couldbetter determine the cause underlying the results in the studiescurrently under consideration. If the subjunctive does not respondto other treatments differently, then the linguistic feature is in-deed a stubborn one.

Conclusion

I hope to have argued reasonably for the psycholinguisticvalidity and practical utility of PI, that it is unique as a particulartype of input-oriented approach to instruction on formal featuresbecause of its attempt to alter processing strategies, and that thechallenges made to it must be interpreted with caution. We nowhave almost a decade of research that has examined differentvariables and that has included a number of replication studies.The evidence overall supports the initial findings of VanPatten andCadierno (1993): PI is superior to TI. As we continue our researchagenda looking at other aspects of PI (e.g., long-term effects),

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others are encouraged to conduct replication studies as well andto continue to challenge us. As part of conceptual replicationstudies, those in which PI is contrasted with some other type ofoutput-oriented instruction would be very useful. PI clearly helpslearners to make form-meaning connections for acquisition, but atleast one study demonstrated that one instructional type, MOI,seems to be as good as PI in terms of improved performance onassessment tasks. Unfortunately, replication studies in generalare not as valued as “original” research in cases of tenure andpromotion, and this may be why so few are conducted to begin with(Polio & Gass, 1997). Perhaps the big challenge, then, is to changethis perception in our academies so that replication (in any areaof SLA) finds its rightful place in the discourse of our profession.

Revised version accepted 15 February 2002

Notes

1I thank Alessandro Benati for sharing his materials with me during thedevelopment of his study.2Salaberry (1997) claims to follow the guidelines in Lee and VanPatten (1995)closely, but there is no evidence of this in the treatment materials.3It is clear in the case of the Salaberry (1997) study that we do not agree onthe differences between his study and ours and what the results of the twostudies actually mean. See Sanz and VanPatten (1998) and Salaberry (1998)for a discussion.

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VanPatten 2002