The Transfer-of-Training Effects Of Processing Instruction On English Third Person Singular Present Tense For Chinese Junior High School Students

Grammar,as an indispensable section in foreign language teaching and language acquisition,has attracted much attention.For a long time,the Grammar-Translation Method and traditional instruction method have occupied the dominant position in terms of grammar instruction.However,it is found that the effects of these two instructional methods are not lasting.Moreover,students cannot draw inferences from one instance and use them flexibly.In order to make up for the deficiency of traditional instruction,Van Patten proposed the input processing instruction in 1993 which aims to change learners’ nonoptimal strategies of input processing and establish the linkage between the form and the meaning in the processing instruction so as to master the grammar structure firmly.Hereafter,the research on input processing instruction has been in vogue.At present,a majority of studies are restricted to testing the primary effects of processing instruction or comparing its primary effects with other instructional methods.However,there are few studies focusing on its training-of-training effects,as well as in China.Therefore,to fill the gap between this study and previous studies,this study aims to explore the transfer-of-training effects of processing instruction on English third person singular present tense for Chinese junior high school students.The research questions are as follows: in terms of the interpretation task and the production task,1)What are the primary effects of PI and TI on the acquisition of English third person singular present tense? 2)What are the secondary transfer-of-training effects of PI and TI from the acquisition of English third person singular present tense to the simple past tense? 3)What are the cumulative transfer-of-training effects of PI and TI from the acquisition of English third person singular present tense to the passive voice?The subjects of this study were 106 students in Grade 7 who came from three parallel classes of a junior high school.Two of three classes were randomly selected as experimental groups using processing instruction and traditional grammar teaching method to teach the English third person singular present tense.And the other class is the control group.The language background survey was conducted two weeks before the formal beginning of the experiment.The experimental period was divided into three classes.The immediate posttests were conducted after the instruction immediately,and the delayed posttests were finished two weeks later.The results of this study showed that:1)With regard to the acquisition of English third person singular present tense,both processing instruction and traditional instruction had remarkable primary effects.In terms of interpretation tasks,both processing instruction and the traditional instruction groups’ scores were significantly higher than the control group,and scores of the processing instruction group were much excellent than the traditional instruction group.In terms of the production task,both processing instruction and the traditional instruction groups’ scores were also significantly higher than the control group,but there was no significant difference between the scores of those two empirical groups.2)As for the secondary transfer-of-training effects,processing instruction and traditional instruction had some secondary transfer-of-training effects.To be specific,two experimental groups had significant transfer-of-training effects in the aspects of interpretation tasks and the production task,but the effects of processing instruction were more significant than that of traditional instruction.3)In the process of cumulative transfer-of-training,both processing instruction and traditional instruction had a few cumulative transfer-of-training effects.The two experimental groups both had cumulative transfer effects in terms of interpretation tasks,and the processing instruction group had more cumulative transfer effects than the traditional instruction group.As for the production task,the three groups have no obvious advance because the passive voice is too difficult to be produced in a short time.In addition,according to the delayed posttest,it could be concluded that the primary effects and transfer-ot-training effects of processing instruction were more lasting than the traditional instruction group.To sum up,it was indicated that processing instruction could help learners transfer what they have learned to other grammar structures by optimizing processing strategies of grammar learning.