Structured input practice or enhanced structured practice?

What is structured input? To make better form meaning connections, we manipulate the input We structure it in ways that force learners to attend to a form and connect it with its meaning

What is enhanced input? Typographically marked (bold, underlined, etc.) Acoustically marked (voice raised)

Previous Research VanPatten & Oikennon (1996) – Spanish Object pronouns Benati (2003) - Italian Future Benati (2004) - Adjective agreement Farley (2004) - Subjunctive Wong (2004) - French negative + indefinite article

Enhancing Structured Input Lee and Benati Second Language Processing. London: Continuum.

The study Non-meaningful and redundant forms What are the processing problems? The redundancy of the adjective’s form The Non-meaningfulness of gender agreement on adjectives

VP’s Processing Principles The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle: learners are more likely to process nonredundant meaningful grammatical form before they process redundant meaningful forms. The Meaning-Before-Nonmeaning Principle: learners are more likely to process meaningful grammatical forms before nonmeaningful forms irrespective of redundancy.

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

Adjective agreement SI versus SI-E RQ: Do learners make greater grammatical gains on Italian gender agreement on adjectives by performing SI activities in which the target form is enhanced compared to performing SI activities without enhanced forms as measured by an interpretation test? By a production test?

Design R + PRE-POST TEST DESIGN – cut off 50% Subjects – Undergraduate – first semester – beginners - –pretest =15%- 19% –first semester beginning learners –n = 11 (SI) and 9 (SI-E) –Treatment – Two packets of Material two days (4 Hours) – No production practice –referential and affective activities (equal) –Same Teacher/facilitator

Design SPLIT-BLOCK DESIGN Interpretation test (describing people) –20 items: 10 targets – 10 distracters –Scoring 1/10 Production test (short story) –10 items; 5 masc. (-o) and 5 fem (-a) –10 distracters (-e) –Scoring 1/0

Results On both interpretation and production… ANOVA showed: –No difference at pre-test level –Significant effect for Time –No significant effect for Treatment –No significant interaction

Results TaskTreatmentPretestPosttestImprove- ment Interpre- tation SI SI-E % 47% Produc- tion SI SI-E % 39%

Discussion Both questions answered in the negative Both groups improved equally well in both assessment measures SI practice plays a central role

Conclusion The study addressed the processing problem L2 learners encounter when morphology is non-meaningful and redundant Textually/aurally enhancing SI does not cause greater improvement in learners ’ performance Enhanced SI is equally as effective as regular SI

Limitations Size Lack of discourse tasks and practice Lack of delayed post-tests Further research