Processing instruction effects regardless of input modality and developmental processing constraints? A school lab classroom study on the morphosyntactic acquisition of L2-English

Tanja Angelovska; Dietmar  Roehm

doi:10.1558/isla.40640

Authors

Tanja Angelovska University of Salzburg
Dietmar Roehm University of Salzburg

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1558/isla.40640

Keywords:

L2 processing, processing instruction, input processing, morphosyntax

Abstract

We investigated whether Austrian L2-English learners would benefit more from written or auditory processing instruction (PI) on the third person singular -(e) s tense form. The instruction and all three tests (pre-test, immediate post-test and delayed post-test two weeks after the instruction) were conducted in school lab classrooms. Using accuracy scores and reaction times for the interpretation tasks and accuracy scores for a gap-filling task, this study extrapolates the instructional effects according to modality type. We aimed to find out whether (a) the modality of the PI affects its efficacy regardless of the imposed develop-mental processing constraints of the target feature and how (i.e. resulting in faster or slower and more or less accurate processing); (b) whether any differences in gains could be attributed to the modality of the assessment task; and (c) whether any gained positive effects of instruction (regardless of modality) are maintained over time.

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Author Biographies

Tanja Angelovska, University of Salzburg

Tanja Angelovska is an Associate Professor for English Linguistics and Language Teaching at the University of Salzburg. Her research areas include psycholinguistics and L2/ L3 acquisition. She has led and been involved in several projects investigating the acquisition, processing and use of English as a second and third language across various age groups and language combinations. She is associate member of the Centre for Research and Enterprise in Language (University of Greenwich), the Centre for Applied Research and Innovation in Language Sciences and Education (University of Portsmouth) and the Language Acquisition, Multilingualism, & Cognition (LAM-C) Laboratory (Wilfrid Laurier University), Brain & Cognition Lab (Texas A&M University, USA), and editorial board member of Journal of Multilingual Theories and Practices, Instructed Second Language Acquisition and Journal of Monolingual and Bilingual Speech. She has published in Language Awareness, International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics Review, and she is
co-author of Second Language Acquisition: A Theoretical Introduction to Real World Applications (2016, Bloomsbury) and co-edited L3 Syntactic Syntactic Transfer (2017, John Benjamins).

Dietmar Roehm, University of Salzburg

Dietmar Roehm acquired extensive expertise in the areas of signal analysis and modelling of EEG data, eye-tracking, language processing and architecture of languages as a Senior Research Fellow at the MPI for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (Leipzig)
and as a visiting researcher at the UMass Amherst. His research focuses on languagerelated brain oscillations, language comprehension and on the role of prediction in (sign) language processing and disorders of language. More recently, he also has a focus on L2/L3 learning and processing (with English/German as a second/third language) across various age groups. Since 2014 he is Full Professor for Psycho-/Neuro- and Clinical Linguistics at the Department of Linguistics, principle investigator in the Centre for Cognitive Neuroscience (University of Salzburg) and head of the research group Neurobiology of Language. In addition, he is an Associate Member of the Language Acquisition, Multilingualism, & Cognition (LAM-C) Laboratory, Wilfrid Laurier University, Waterloo, Canada.

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Processing instruction effects regardless of input modality and developmental processing constraints? A school lab classroom study on the morphosyntactic acquisition of L2-English

Authors

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