The Effects Of Processing Instruction On The Acquisition Of Appositive Clauses By Chinese English Learners In Senior High School

Grammar acquisition has always been one of the focal points in the domain of second language acquisition.Consequently,how to teach grammar effectively has become a popular research topic in the view of researchers.As relevant studies go deeper,scholars begin to turn their eyes to processing instruction in recent decades.There have been quite a few studies comparing processing instruction with traditional instruction,but most of them simply investigate the effects on morph-syntactic aspects,such as English simple past tense or passive voice.Studies concerning subordinate sentences remain insufficient.For this reason,the present study,targeting at English appositive clause,intends to compare the effects of processing instruction with the traditional kind on Chinese senior high English learners.Three research questions are to be answered in this study:(2)Which instruction can achieve better results on the acquisition of appositive clauses in view of initial and retention effects,processing instruction or traditional instruction?(2)What are the relative effects of processing instruction and traditional instruction on the acquisition of appositive clauses in terms of interpretative and productive tasks? Research subjects were selected from three natural classes in Tieyi senior high of Hengyang,155 in total.Participants were randomly divided into three groups,namely,the PI group,the TI group,and the control group.During the experiment,the PI group received processing instruction,the TI group got the traditional kind,but the control fellows did not receive any.After the instruction,all three groups took part in the immediate post-test and one month later,they participated in a delayed post-test.The testing paper consisted of interpretation tasks and production tasks.When the experiment was finished,all data were collected for analysis.From the data analysis,the study found that:(1)Both the PI group and TI group made significant progress in the immediate post-test while the control group enjoyed zero,but the progress they made did not differ.Processing instruction and traditional instruction,as a result,have the same initial teaching effects.The PI group had significantly improved more than the TI group in the delayed post-test,demonstrating that processing instruction has relatively better retention effects than traditional instruction.(2)In terms of interpretative tasks,the PI group performed better than its TI counterpart in two post-tests,whereas the TI group won over in both post-tests with regard to productive tasks.Thus,processing instruction can boost learners’ interpretative knowledge more effectively,while traditional instruction brings more favorable results when it comes to learners’ productive knowledge.All in all,the research shows that in Chinese EFL classes,besides traditional instruction,it is better for English teachers to adopt processing instruction properly so as to help learners process language input and enjoy better instructional effects.