A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Processing Instruction And Traditional Instruction On The Acquisition Of The English Subjunctive Mood In EFL Classroom

Nowadays grammar instruction still plays a very important part in secondary EFL classes in China. The traditional way, in which the target grammatical structures are taught, is mostly output-oriented, with a focus on rule explanation from the teachers followed by immediate output practice for students. Motivated by the theoretical inadequacies of the traditional instruction, with the direction of Constructive teaching, Bill VanPatten developed Processing Instruction (PI), which attempts to facilitate learners' acquisition of the target form by directing more of their attention to the processing of input. This study aims to investigate the comparative effects of PI and TI, and also explores the potential for adopting PI in China.The subjects were two intact classes of the second graders from a secondary vocational school in Fujian. One class received traditional instruction and the other received processing instruction. An immediate posttest and a delayed posttest were used as means for assessing the effects of instruction. All the experimental data were processed by the use of SPSS. The results of Pair-Sample T-Test show that the processing group did do better than the traditional group in all of the comprehension tasks, suggesting better effects for processing instruction on comprehension. For the production task, the PI group did almost equally well in the blank-filling task, but their performance in the sentence-combining task was not satisfactory, indicating that the effect really has something to do with the difficulty of the tasks. When the production task is difficult, output practice is still necessary for accurate production. Compared with TI group, PI group made a little progress between two posttests, proving that the effects of PI can persist better beyond the time of the instruction than those of TI. Therefore, English teachers are advised to use the combination of the two approaches when teaching some difficult and complicated grammar in order to help the students construct grammar rules actively. To conclude, further research is needed for a thorough understanding of the effects of Processing Instruction.