The Effect Of Explicit Information In Processing Instruction On Middle School Students’ Acquisition Of English Passive Voice

For a long time,grammar teaching has been the key and difficult point in foreign language teaching.A lot of researches have been conducted to boost the effectiveness of grammar teaching,with many approaches being put forward.Processing Instruction(PI)is one of them.Proposed by Van Patten in 1993,it contains two parts: 1)explicit information about target linguistic structure and non-optimal processing strategy(EI);2)structured input activity(SI).PI mainly aims to push learners away from non-optimal processing strategy so that they can establish stronger form-meaning connection and have a good command of the target structure.Studies on PI usually compare it with other approaches while a few pays attention to the effect of EI in PI.Considering the latter,there is still no consensus,with some regarding EI useless and ought to be deleted.Besides,in all those researches,subjects are university students,speak English as their first language and all have a basic foundation of the target language.Therefore,this study took English beginners in China English as foreign language classrooms as subjects and intended to explore the effects of EI in PI on the learning of English passive voice through analyzing the teaching process and results.The specific research questions were: 1)which group would establish form-meaning connection of English passive voice sooner: the complete Processing Instruction group(+EI)group or the Structured Input Activity only(-EI)group? 2)which one would improve students’ performance most in terms of comprehension and production task on the acquisition of English passive voice: explicit information,structured input or a combination of the two?There were 94 subjects in total from Grade 7 in three intact classes in Luneng Bashu middle school in Chongqing.They were divided into three groups based on different treatments: SI group(n=31),PI group(n=30),and EI group(n=33).The whole experiment design followed a pretest-treatment-immediate post-test-delayed post-test sequence.All tests included comprehension and production tasks.The results showed that during the process,PI group was no sooner than the SI group to establish form-meaning connection and two groups did not perform significantly differently after they successfully built the connection.When it came to the teaching result,be it EI or SI,one alone could remarkably improve participants’ comprehensive and productive ability of the target structure.But only when they were conducted together as PI,could participants gain the most improvement.The results of this study indicated that EI could not enable English beginners whose native language was Chinese to process target linguistic structure sooner,but it could lift learning outcome.And it’s a crucial part of PI.