Language Learning 52:4, December 2002, pp.

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Processing Instruction: An Update

Bill VanPatten
University of Illinois at Chicago

In this article I review processing instruction (PI), first introduced in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). I outline a model of input processing, then describe the nature of PI itself, and follow this with a description of research to date on PI. I also review research that offers counterevidence to the findings of my own and others research and argue that some of these studies can be considered not as contradictory, but as complementary, to the research on PI, whereas some of the other studies contain drawbacks in design and procedure that merit close scrutiny.

In VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) and VanPatten (1993) a particular approach to instruction in grammatical form was outlined (see also Lee & VanPatten, 1995, as well as VanPatten, 1996). Termed processing instruction (PI), this particular approach was predicated on my previous research regarding learners inputprocessing (IP) strategies (summarized in VanPatten, 1996). The research presented in VanPatten and Cadierno has been widely

I would like to thank Joe Barcroft, Alessandro Benati, Joe Collentine, Robert DeKeyser, James F. Lee, Susanne Rott, Cristina Sanz, Jessica Williams, and Wynne Wong for continued discussion on processing instruction, for sharing their ideas with me, for discussing issues related to input and output, and/or for reading an earlier draft of this article. I would also like to thank Nick Ellis and the four anonymous reviewers for their very insightful and useful comments on an earlier draft. They are, of course, not responsible for the ideas contained herein. Correspondence concerning this article may be addressed to Bill VanPatten, Department of Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese, MC-315, 601 South Morgan Street, Chicago, IL 60601-7117. Internet: bvp@uic.edu

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cited and has generated considerable discussion (see, for example, Doughty and Williams, 1998; Ellis, 1998; Jordens, 1996; and Skehan, 1998, among others). Some subsequent research has offered evidence as to the generalizability of the findings of VanPatten and Cadierno, and some research has not. In this article I will review the nature of PI. First I will review the model of IP described in VanPatten (1996) and VanPatten (2000a) in order to provide the theoretical foundations of PI. Subsequently, I will review the nature of PI in terms of its components and purpose showing how it is informed by the model of IP. Because the VanPatten and Cadierno study has sparked considerable discussion in the literature and because it has served as the basis for a number of replication studies, I will review this study in detail. Subsequently I will review the replication research on PI and will conclude that the original findings of VanPatten and Cadierno are indeed generalizable to other populations and grammatical structures. I will point out how the studies that have reported counterfindings to those of the VanPatten and Cadierno study, although interesting in their own right, do not necessarily offer evidence against the conclusions made in VanPatten and Cadiernos work. Several of the studies, I argue, can be considered as offering complementary findings with important indications for future research on PI.

Input Processing
The role of input as a construct in second language acquisition (SLA) is perhaps best captured by Gass (1997) in the opening lines of her book:
The concept of input is perhaps the single most important concept of second language acquisition. It is trivial to point out that no individual can learn a second language without input of some sort. In fact, no model of second language acquisition does not avail itself of input in trying to explain how learners create second language grammars. (p. 1, emphasis added)

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What is clear from over two decades of SLA research is that it is not sufficient to speak of input in general terms. What is necessary is that the learning mechanisms that act upon input or interact with it be spelled out in some fashion. One way in which this is done is by examining IP.
One Model of IP

IP is concerned with how learners derive intake from input regardless of the language being learned and regardless of the context (i.e., instructed, noninstructed). Intake is defined as the linguistic data actually processed from the input and held in working memory for further processing. As such, IP attempts to explain how learners get form from input and how they parse sentences during the act of comprehension while their primary attention is on meaning. Form in this model refers to surface features of language (e.g., functors, inflections), although IP is also relevant to syntax (see VanPatten, 1996, chap. 5). In VanPatten (1996, 2000a, in press) one model of IP is presented. This model consists of a set of principles and corollaries (listed in Table 1) that interact in complex ways in working memory. It is important to point out the role of working memory in this model since the first two principles are predicated on a limited capacity for processing information; that is, learners can do only so much in their working memory before attentional resources are depleted and working memory is forced to dump information to make room for more (incoming) information. That learners are driven to get meaning from input (P1) has a set of consequences, the first being that words (content lexical items) are searched out first since, at least in the learners mind, if not in any fluent speaker-listeners, words are the principal source of referential meaning (P1a). Of importance for the acquisition of grammatical form, then, is P1b. This principle holds that when content lexical items and a grammatical form both encode the same meaning and when both are present in a sentence/ utterance, it is the lexical item that learners attend to for the

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Table 1 Principles of Input Processing

P1. Learners process input for meaning before they process it for form. P1a. Learners process content words in the input before anything else. P1b. Learners prefer processing lexical items to grammatical items (e.g., morphology) for the same semantic information. P1c. Learners prefer processing more meaningful morphology before less or nonmeaningful morphology. P2. For learners to process form that is not meaningful, they must be able to process informational or communicative content at no (or little) cost to attention. P3. Learners possess a default strategy that assigns the role of agent (or subject) to the first noun (phrase) they encounter in a sentence/utterance. This is called the first-noun strategy. P3a. The first-noun strategy may be overridden by lexical semantics and event probabilities. P3b. Learners will adopt other processing strategies for grammatical role assignment only after their developing system has incorporated other cues (e.g., case marking, acoustic stress). P4. Learners process elements in sentence/utterance initial position first. P4a. Learners process elements in final position before elements in medial position.

meaning and not the grammatical form. The following are examples from Spanish: 1. Ayer mis padres me llamaron para decirme algo importante. Here, both the lexical item ayer and the verb inflection -aron encode pastness. The learner does not have to allocate attentional resources to a verb form to grasp that the action took place before the present. At the same time, mis padres as well as -aron encode plurality, and again the learner does not have to allocate attentional resources to an inflection to get that the subject is plural.

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2. No creo que comprenda Ramon lo que dice el profesor. In this example, both no creo and the -a of comprenda are related to mood (what textbooks call the subjunctive of doubt and what linguists might call nonassertion or irrealis, depending on the framework.) The presence of No creo mitigates against the processing of the a, since the latter adds no information to the sentence that the learner cannot get from the former. (We will not repeat here the subject-verb agreement processing problem explicated above.) 3. Dicen que Julieta est enferma y que no viene a clase. In this example, the presence of enferma and the context of not coming to class will give the learner the concept of perfection (temporariness in laypersons terms) and mitigate the processing of est. Likewise, it is Julieta from which the learner gets gender and not the -a of enferma. What these examples help to illustrate is that a great deal of form that is meaning-oriented (i.e., is related to some semantic concept in the real world, what I call referential meaning) may also be expressed by a lexical item or phrase elsewhere in the sentence or the discourse. This observation led me to posit the construct communicative value (VanPatten, 1985). Communicative value refers to the meaning that a form contributes to overall sentence meaning and is based on two features: [+/inherent semantic value] and [+/redundancy]. A given form can have [+semantic value] and [redundancy] (e.g., English -ing), [+semantic value] and [+redundancy] (e.g., subjunctive verb inflections), [semantic value] and [+redundancy] (e.g., adjective concordance in Romance languages), and finally [semantic value] and [redundancy] (e.g., some complementizers such as that). In general, a forms communicative value is greater if it has the characteristics [+semantic value/redundancy] than if it has the characteristics [+semantic value/ redundancy]. In short, if meaning can be retrieved elsewhere and not just from the form itself, then the communicative value of the form is diminished. Forms with [semantic value] regardless of redundancy contain no

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communicative value. In the examples above, the preterit inflection -aron, the subjunctive marker -a, and the copular verb est are all [+redundant] in that their semantic value is present lexically somewhere else. One should note, however, that redundancy is not absolute; most past-tense markers do not always co-occur with a temporal expression in an utterance. One might also hear in the input utterances such as Dnde estudiaste? Where did you study? in which no lexical item provides clues to tense (or to person/number). But one rarely hears the subjunctive without a main clause that triggers it, and one rarely hears copular verbs without a predicate of some kind. In short, some forms are more (often) redundant than others. The nature of communicative value, then, is important for IP: The more a form has communicative value, the more likely it is to get processed and made available in the intake data for acquisition (P1c). A form with no or consistently little communicative value is the least likely to get processed and, without help, may never get acquired. In nonclassroom contexts (and even with many classroom learners) the absence of such forms in learner speech indicates that the learner has perhaps not processed them in the input (although their absence could also indicate output processing problems, a topic beyond the scope of this article; see Pienemann, 1998). Of course, low frequency in the input and other aspects of language may be factors that, along with communicative value, may doom a form to never getting picked up by a learner. Likewise, the intersection of high communicative value and frequency should have a favorable effect on acquisition. IP is also concerned with word order. P3, the first-noun strategy listed in the table, may have important effects on the acquisition of a language that does not follow strict subject-verbobject (SVO) word order or on noncanonical structures in a language that does. In each of the following sentences in Spanish, the first noun phrase the learner encounters is not a subject, but the learner may very well attempt to encode it as such:

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(1) A Juan no le gusta esta clase mucho. John does not like this class much. (2) La vi yo en la fiesta anoche. I saw her at the party last night. (3) Se levanta temprano. He/She gets up early. (4) Nos faltan varios libros. We are missing several books. Research has shown that learners do indeed encode such pronouns and noun phrases as subjects (e.g., Juan is the subject of (1), la is the subject of (2) and means she), thus offering erroneous intake for further processing. In this case, it is not that meaning is gotten elsewhere; it is that meaning is not gotten at all or that it is gotten wrong. Research has led to another important processing principle, P4, that initial sentence position is more salient than final, which in turn is more salient than medial. This means, for example, that learners are much more likely to pick up question words and their syntax than, say, object pronouns or the subjunctive. Learners may not need to be told that Spanish inverts subject and verb in yes/no questions because this is immediately evident in simple questions that learners hear from the first day of exposure (i.e., the verb is in initial position, the most salient). This kind of intake data may be important for Universal Grammarrelated aspects of acquisition such as verb movement, a discussion of which is taken up in detail elsewhere (VanPatten, 1996, chap. 5) and is beyond the scope of the present article. To summarize, research on IP attempts to describe which linguistic data in the input get attended to during comprehension and which do not (or which are privileged and which are not) and what grammatical roles learners assign to nouns. Intake is that subset of filtered input that the learner actually processes and holds in working memory during on-line comprehension. Intake thus contains grammatical information as it relates to the meaning that learners have comprehended (or think they have comprehended). To be sure, IP is but one set of processes related to

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acquisition; that learners derive some kind of intake from the input does mean that the data contained in the intake automatically make their way into the developing mental representation of the second language (L2) in the learners head (i.e., intake 1 acquisition). In previous work (VanPatten, 1996), accommodation of intake and restructuring are seen as processes separate from IP. In addition, how learners access their developing system to make output is also a distinct set of processes. (For detailed discussion see VanPatten, 1996, chaps. 2 and 5, and VanPatten, 2000a, and the references contained therein.)
Output in SLA

So that there is no mistake, it is important to point out that a focus on IP in acquisition does not suggest there is no role for output (in or out of the classroom). Output may play a number of important roles in language development, and in VanPatten (2000b, 2002) I show how the claims about either output or interaction made by Gass (1997) and Swain (1998), for example, are quite compatible with a theory of IP or any theory in which input plays a fundamental role. Output may play a role as a focusing device that draws learners attention to something in the input as mismatches are noted, and it may play a role in the development of fluency and accuracy. Both Gass and Swain, and most other researchers as well, would agree that a role for output in SLA does not mean that input has any less of a role to play in acquisition. Input provides the data, IP makes (certain) data available for acquisition, other internal mechanisms accommodate data into the system (often triggering some kind of restructuring or a change of internally generated hypotheses), and output helps learners become communicators and, again, may help them become better processors of input. This is an important point to underscore, given that one reviewer of this article indicated that he or she did not believe that particular claims are sustainable about the input-to-intake sequences being the only one in which restructuring of the underlying system can occur. The point is well

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taken, but the problem currently in SLA is this: Any theory that would suggest that acquisition does not happen as a result of exposure to and processing of input in some way has yet to establish what the learning mechanism is. IP, the principles and parameters framework, connectionism, the competition model, and others attempt to delimit what the learning mechanisms are or how knowledge sources interact outside of learners processing of raw data from the input. Pienemann (1998), working in an output-processing framework, is clear about this as well. His theory is concerned with how learners develop and can use speechprocessing mechanisms over time and how these mechanisms are implicationally ordered. Because of this focus, he wishes to make plain that he does not link output processing with acquisition in its classic sense: Processability theory, he says, is not designed to contribute anything to the question of the innate or learnt origin of linguistic knowledge or the inferential processes by which linguistic input is converted into linguistic knowledge (p. 5). Again, the point to be understood here is that in all elaborated theories of acquisition, input is fundamental for acquisition and is needed for the creation of an underlying mental representation of the linguistic system. The point of research over the last 20 years has been to determine just what the links are between the developing system and input. IP research is one attempt among a number (see also Carroll, 1999). Future research will no doubt add to the current model of IP or push for alterations in it, especially as parsing is incorporated into any account of IP, and the presentation of the model here has been necessarily brief and without details. Nonetheless, the sketch is sufficient for discussion concerning classroom SLA and a focus on form, the subject of the next section of this article. If learners IP may lead to impoverished intake, a logical question arises: Is there a way to enrich learners intake using insights from IP? Another way to ask this question is, to what degree we can either manipulate learner attention during IP and/or manipulate input data so that more and better formmeaning connections are made?

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Processing Instruction: A Description

As described in VanPatten (1993, 1996) and also Lee and VanPatten (1995), PI is a type of grammar instruction or focus on form derived from the insights of IP. In this section, I describe the characteristics of PI and what distinguishes it from other approaches to focus on form.
PI: Basic Characteristics

The most salient characteristic of PI is that it uses a particular type of input to push learners away from the nonoptimal processing strategies described in the previous section. As such, PI is not a comprehension-based approach to language teaching such as total physical response, the natural approach, and so on. Since the point of PI is to assist the learner in making formmeaning connections during IP, it is more appropriate to view it as a type of focus on form or input enhancement (Sharwood Smith, 1993). A secondary salient characteristic of PI is that during the instructional phase, learners never produce the target form in question. This does not obviate a role for output, as noted previously, since production may be useful for the development of fluency and accuracy as well as of other aspects of language development (see Lee & VanPatten, 1995, chaps. 6 and 8, and VanPatten, 2000b, for discussion). Nonetheless, during PI the learners job is to process sentences and interpret them correctly while attending to form as well. PI has three basic features or components: 1. Learners are given information about a linguistic form or structure. 2. Learners are informed about a particular IP strategy that may negatively affect their picking up of the form or structure during comprehension. 3. Learners are pushed to process the form or structure during activities with structured input: input that is manipulated

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in particular ways so that learners become dependent on form and structure to get meaning and/or to privilege the form or structure in the input so that learners have a better chance of attending to it (i.e., learners are pulled away from their natural processing tendencies toward more optimal tendencies). These features of components of PI can be exemplified in the case of the French causative with faire. The causative generally takes the form seen in examples (5)(6): (5) Jean fait promener le chien Marie. (lit., John makes to walk the dog to Mary.) John makes Mary walk the dog. (6) Mes professeurs me font travailler beaucoup. (lit., My profs to me make work hard.) My profs make me work hard. In (5), there are two verbs and two nouns. The first verb is fait, with its obligatorily preposed subject Jean. The second verb is promener, with its underlying subject, Marie, obligatorily placed in postverbal position and marked by the preposition . It is the underlying subject of the second verb that is the problem for learners of French. When asked Who walks the dog? learners overwhelmingly say Jean, since he is the first noun that appears before the verb, thus demonstrating their reliance on P3. When asked to give a rough translation, learners will say the sentence means something like John walks the dog for Mary. In (6) the causative structure is different, because the underlying subject of the second verb appears preverbally but not as a subject pronoun. In this case, the pronoun is an indirect object. When asked Who works hard? learners will tend to say My professors, once again demonstrating reliance on P3. Their overall interpretation of the sentence is something like My profs work hard for me. In short, learners tend to gloss over the verb faire and process the second verb. At the same time, they assign the first noun as subject of the second verb. (See MacDonald & Heilenman, 1992, as well as the pretest data in Allen, 2000, for research on L2 learners sentence

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processing in French.) With this in mind, a PI supplemental lesson on the causative would first begin with a brief explanation of what the structure is and looks like. Following this, learners would be told that it is natural to process the first noun as the subject of the verb but that this is inappropriate for this structure. Subsequently they would work through written and aural activities in which they are pushed to process sentences correctly. These activities are called structured input activities. Here is one example:
Activit A. Listen to each sentence. Then indicate who is performing the action by answering each question. 1. Who cleans the room? __________________ 2. Who packs the bags? ___________________ etc. Activity A. Teachers script: Read each sentence once. After each sentence, ask for an answer. Do not wait until the end to review answers. Students do not repeat or otherwise produce the structure. 1. Claude fait nettoyer la chambre Richard. 2. Marc fait les valises pour Jean. etc.

The above are examples of referential structured input activities. Referential activities are those for which there is a right or wrong answer and for which the learner must rely on the targeted grammatical form to get meaning. Normally, a sequence of structured input activities would begin with two or three referential activities. It is important to point out that in the above activities, causative structures with faire are mixed in with noncausatives with faire (e.g., to go skiing in French is faire du ski). In this way, learners are pushed to listen to every sentence and not to apply a strategy that judges all sentences to be causative simply because that is the grammatical point that they are learning. Following referential activities, learners are engaged in affective structured input activities. These are activities in which learners express an opinion, belief, or some other affective

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response and are engaged in processing information about the real world. The following is an example of an affective activity that could follow the above referential activities:
Activit D. In this activity you will compare and contrast what someone gets a child to do with what someone gets a dog to do. For each item, indicate whether it refers to the small child ( lenfant), the dog (au chien) or possibly both ( tous les deux). Un adulte. . . 1. fait chercher los /au 2. fait faire la vaisselle /au 3. fait manger certaine heure /au 4. fait jouer dhors /au 5. fait se baigner /au 6. fait dormir au plancher /au 7. fait se porter bien /au _______ sil y a des invits. 8. fait boire du lait /au Does everyone in class agree? . . . . . . .

(Note that in PI there are no mechanical or nonmeaningful activities. For guidelines on the creation of structured input activities, see Lee & VanPatten, 1995, chap. 5, as well as VanPatten, 1993, 1996).
What Differentiates PI From Other Types of Instruction

The effects of PI have been investigated in a number of studies. In the next two sections, I review this research and the questions it has addressed. Before doing so, it is important to place PI within the broader context of focus-on-form or formal instruction. What is critically different about PI with respect to other treatments that have an input orientation (e.g., textual enhancement, recasts, input flood) is that PI first identifies a potentially problematic processing strategy from the model of IP described in the previous section and then provides activities that push learners away from that strategy. In other words, PI determines not just what is a problem form or structure, but why it is a problem vis--vis one of the learning mechanisms involved in SLA.

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To my knowledge, no other instructional treatment does this. The reason this point is worth emphasizing is that one might conclude that PI is narrowly defined or circumscribed in such a way as to be trivial or not useful, important points raised by two reviewers of this article. I would argue that although one could consider it narrowly defined because of its close relationship to a model of IP, it is also a rather useful teaching device to have, since the IP model can be used to make predications about processing problems for a wide variety of structures in different languages. For example, given the built-in redundancy of most languages, P1b would make predictions about a variety of formal features that carry semantic information that is also encoded elsewhere in an utterance. P4 can be used to examine forms in a language to determine to what extent they are acoustically nonsalient, and P3 can be used to determine to what extent learners would attend to case markers in languages that have them. Knowing these processing problems, then, PI activities could be constructed for a good many structures and forms. The narrowness of PI, one could argue, is actually its strength. To me, this is important because as we move increasingly toward technology-enhanced instruction, ideally we would like materials with which learners can work on their own via computer that are well-grounded in both theory and research. PI may not be the only such approach to form-focused instruction, but its easy adaptation to technology should be clear. (Later I will review a study that delivers PI via computer.) As an additional point, the aim of PI is in line with claims of those researchers who assert that acquisition is a failure-driven process (e.g., Carroll, 1999). That is, for acquisition to happen, processing mechanisms must note that the parsing procedure is not getting the listener/learner the right information about the events (e.g., who did what to whom) and must therefore seek alternative procedures for successful interpretation. When these new procedures are successful, they replace the procedures that are not (or exist along with them). PI is designed to cause failure in interpretation at the beginning stages of activities so that the processors can begin to readjust. Because PI uses positive

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evidence in the form of meaning-based utterances to which learners respond, it is a type of input intervention quite unlike others. In short, PI does not manipulate the processors; it manipulates the input data so that the processors can do whatever it is they need to do to change. In this way, it is also different from the garden path technique, which is failure driven via output practice that involves leading learners to conscious hypotheses about the target structure.

The Original Study

The study that launched the research agenda (and subsequent discussion) on PI is VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). I will review this study in some detail because it is the most frequently cited and has been the impetus for a number of replication studies. In this study, we set out to answer the following research questions: 1. Does altering the way in which learners process input have an effect on their developmental systems? 2. If there is an effect, is it limited solely to processing more input or does instruction in IP also have an effect on output? 3. If there is an effect, is it the same effect that traditional instruction (TI) has (assuming an effect for the latter)? We compared three groups of learners: a PI group (n = 27), a TI group (n = 26), and a control (n = 27). The PI group received instruction along the lines presented earlier. The focus was word order and object pronouns in Spanish. Previous research (again, summarized in VanPatten, 1996) had demonstrated that learners of Spanish misinterpret object-verb-subject (OVS) and object-verb (OV) structures as SVO and subject-verb (SV) structures, respectively. In Spanish, object pronouns precede finite verbs, and subjects may be optionally deleted or may appear postverbally. Thus, learners misinterpret structures such as Lo ve Mara as He sees Mary rather than the correct Mary sees him. In the PI

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treatment, learners first received referential activities with right or wrong answers (e.g., select the picture that best goes with what you hear) followed by affective activities in which they offered opinions or personal answers. At no point did the learners in this group produce the structure and forms in question. In the TI group, learners received a treatment based on the most popular Spanish college-level text at the time. The treatment involved a typical explanation of object pronouns, including the complete paradigm of the forms, and then was followed by mechanical, then meaningful, then communicative practices (see Paulston, 1972). At no time did this group engage in any interpretation activities. This particular approach to grammar instruction was selected because it is the dominant approach to grammar in foreign language classrooms in the United States. (I will address the selection of TI again later.) Both experimental treatments were balanced for tokens, vocabulary, and other factors that could affect the outcome. In addition, all instruction was performed by the same instructor and lasted two days. This instructor believed that there would be differential outcomes; that the processing group would learn to interpret better and that the traditional group would be better at production (an important point to bring up given the results). The control group received no instruction on the target structure and instead read an essay and discussed it in class. Assessment consisted of two tests: a sentence-level interpretation test and a sentence-level production test. These were administered as a pretest, an immediate posttest, a 2-week delayed posttest, and a 4-week delayed posttest with various versions used in a split-block design (e.g., if a participant received version A as the pretest, he would receive B as the first posttest, C as the second posttest, and D as the final posttest, whereas another participant might receive D as the pretest, C as the first posttest, and so on). The interpretation test consisted of 10 target items and 10 distracters; the production test consisted of 5 items with 5 distracters. The interpretation test was based on a referential activity performed by the processing group (e.g., select the picture that

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best goes with what you hear), whereas the production test was based on an activity the traditional group performed during their treatment phase (e.g., complete the sentence based on the pictures you see). The items on the interpretation test were scored as right or wrong answer for 1 point each (total = 10 points), and the items on the production test were scored as 2 points each (2 points if correct use of object pronoun with correct word order, 0 points for no object pronoun, 1 point for incorrect use of object pronoun or problem with word order). The results were clear. An analysis of variance (ANOVA) on the pretests yielded no differences among the groups on the two tests prior to treatment. In the posttesting phase, the processing group made significant gains on the interpretation test, whereas the traditional and control groups did not. The gain was maintained for the month during which posttesting was conducted. On the production test, both the traditional and processing groups made significant gains but were not significantly different from each other. These gains were maintained over the month-long posttesting phase. The control group did not make significant gains in either area. In terms of our research questions, we took our results to mean three things. First, altering the way learners process input can alter their developing systems. The processing group showed evidence of this on both interpretation and production tests. Second, the effects of PI are not limited to processing but also show up on production measures. Finally, the effects of PI are different from those of TI. With PI, learners get two for one: By being pushed to process form and meaning simultaneously, they not only became able to process better but could also access their newfound knowledge to produce a structure that they never produced during the treatment phase. The traditional group made gains only on production and did not make gains in the ability to correctly process form and meaning in the input. We took these latter results to mean that the TI group learned to do a task, whereas the PI group experienced a change in their underlying knowledge that allowed them to perform on different kinds of tasks.

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It is worth pointing out that at no time did our conclusions refer to comprehension versus production. Our final conclusion was that instruction that was directed at intervening in learners processing strategies should have a significant impact on the learners developing system.

Questions
The VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study, like any empirical study, contains limitations that suggest future research. These suggestions can be articulated in a series of questions, to which I now turn.
Are the Effects of PI Generalizable to Other Structures?

Cadierno (1995) replicated the VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study using the Spanish preterit (past) tense as the target structure. This structure is morphologically complex and creates more problems for learners in terms of form than in terms of use. Again, contrasting a control, a TI, and a PI group, Cadierno measured the effects of treatment via two measures: an interpretation test (e.g., is the sentence youre hearing present, past or future?note that only the verb encoded temporality; no adverbs were used) and a production test (e.g., participants had to write sentences in the past to describe a situation). Cadiernos results matched those of VanPatten and Cadierno exactly: On the interpretation test, the PI group improved significantly, but the other two groups did not. On the production test, the PI and TI groups both improved significantly but were not different from each other. The control group did not improve. In her dissertation, Cheng (1995) conducted a study with ser and estar, the two major copular verbs in Spanish. She compared a control, a processing, and a traditional group, with the use of the copular verbs with adjectives as the target. Her assessments included an interpretation and production test, as in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993), but she also added a more complex test, a

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written composition based on pictures. In her final analysis, Cheng focused on improvement with the verb estar, since students tend to use ser as the default (see VanPatten, 1987, and others). Her results mirrored those of the original VanPatten and Cadierno study. On the interpretation test, only the processing group improved. On the production test, only the processing and traditional groups improved and were not significantly different from each other. On the composition task, all groups improved significantly, but the processing and traditional groups posttest scores were significantly greater than those of the control group. (It is not clear why the control group improved at all, but their gains were minimal, albeit enough to be different from their pretest scores.) There was no difference between the processing and traditional groups on the composition task. In another study, Farley (2001a) demonstrated the effects of PI on the Spanish subjunctive with noun clauses. He showed that participants who received PI made significant gains in both interpretation and production abilities with the subjunctive both in form and use. (The object of Farleys study was not to compare traditional and PI, and we will return to the study later in another section. The point here is that the subjunctive is amenable to PI.) In another dissertation, Buck (2000) investigated the relative effects of PI and TI in the acquisition of the present continuous (vs. the present progressive) in English by native speakers of Spanish. Her assessment tests included the ability to correctly interpret sentences such as Bill is smoking a pipe and Bill smokes a pipe, as well as the ability to produce the correct structure in a given context (e.g., I ___ to music every day [listen] and We ___ the new schedule this week [prepare]). Her results indicated greater gains for the processing group that were maintained over time on the interpretation test; initial gains made by the traditional group were not maintained. On the production test, both groups made similar gains, and the gains were maintained over time. In one other study, VanPatten and Wong (in press) demonstrated that PI was superior to TI with the French causative (faire

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causatif). Replicating VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) as closely as possible, Van Patten and Wong compared a control, a processing, and a traditional group and measured outcomes with an interpretation and a production test. Their results were similar to those of the original study: On the interpretation test, the processing group was superior to the traditional group; the control group did not improve. On the production test, the processing and traditional groups both improved significantly but were not different from each other. The control group did not improve. Important to point out here is that the gains made by the processing group on the interpretation task were not maintained over time. This is due not to a decline in performance, but to absenteeism on the final posttest. Several participants who had made the maximum possible gains on the immediate posttest were absent for the final posttest. Given the small n sizes of this study, the decline was due to sampling problems in the final posttest. In another study involving the acquisition of verbal morphology, Benati (2001) compared PI, TI, and a control group using the Italian future tense as the target structure.1 He included a pretest, an immediate posttest, and a 3-week delayed posttest. Each test consisted of an interpretation task similar to Cadiernos and a two-part production task. The latter contained a written sentencelevel task in which participants had to provide future-tense forms and an oral task in which they saw pictures and narrated a sequence of events in the future. Benatis results were similar to, but not the same as, those of the original VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study. On the interpretation task, the PI group improved significantly, the TI group did as well, and the control group did improved somewhat. However, the gains made by the PI group were significantly greater compared with those of the TI group, such that the results on the interpretation task are PI > TI > C (with > indicating better than). On the two production tasks, the PI and TI groups both improved, with no difference between them; the control group did not improve. The improvement of the TI group on the interpretation task is traceable to the types of activities in which they engaged in the experimental treatment.

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Benati points out that unlike VanPatten and Cadierno, he minimized the use of mechanical or purely form-oriented activities. The effects of a purely meaning-based nature of instruction will be taken up later when we review Farley (2001a, 2001b). To summarize so far, the work that I have conducted collaboratively, in addition to the work of several other independent researchers, offers evidence that the results of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) are generalizable to other structures and in different languages and at least that the effects of PI alone are generalizable to other structures. There is evidence for the superiority of PI over TI for object pronouns and word order in Spanish, for complex verbal morphology in Spanish (the preterit) and Italian (future tense), for lexical-aspectual choice (copular verbs in Spanish), for agent-dative relations and word order in French, for mood selection in subordinate clauses in Spanish, and for the present continuous versus the progressive in English. (Again, the Farley study did not set out to compare TI and PI.) Since the publication of the original VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study, several researchers have questioned the generalizability of that studys results. Their questions concerned either the generalizability of our findings to other structures or the generalizability of our finding that overall PI is superior to TI in terms of treatment effects. Four studies have been published that report findings different from those of the original VanPatten and Cadierno study, three overtly claiming to be replications and/or responses. These studies find that there is either no superior effect for PI compared to other instruction or that PI may produce inferior results compared with other instruction and is not generalizable to other structures. Borrowing several suggestions in Polio and Gass (1997), the results and conclusions of these studies can be considered using several questions to organize the discussion: 1. Are these studies replications? 2. Whether they are replications or not, how might we interpret their findings vis--vis PI?

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I will review the studies first and then will return to these two questions. One of the first published studies to reports results different from those of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) was DeKeyser and Solkaski (1996). Using Andersons ACT skill theory, DeKeyser and Solkaski argue that VanPatten and Cadiernos findings are contradictory to skill theory in that the processing group should have learned only to comprehend better and that the traditional group should have learned to produce better. In their study, input and output experimental groups were compared to a control group. The target items were Spanish object pronouns and word order, as in VanPatten and Cadierno, but the authors also conducted a second experiment with the conditional tense in Spanish. During the treatment phase, they kept the need for meaning as similar as possible for the two treatment groups (p. 625). That is, if a particular exercise did not require a certain attention to meaning (p. 625), they made sure that the lack of attention to meaning was present in the corresponding exercises of both groups. In short, they followed the progression of mechanical to meaningful to communicative exercises for both experimental treatments (p. 626). The explicit phase for both groups was the same. Assessment was made via a comprehension test and a production test, the latter involving both translation and fill in the blank. DeKeyser and Solkaskis (1996) results were complex. First, for the object pronouns, they found that the input group was better on comprehension after treatment and that the output group was better on the production test. However, this difference disappeared on a delayed posttest, and even the control group was performing almost as well as the other two groups by the time the delayed posttest was given. For the conditional, they found an overall advantage for the output group on both tests but this advantage, too, disappeared by the time the delayed posttest was given. What is important to highlight here is that the input group did not drop in performance from the immediate posttest to the delayed posttest; the output group did, and this is what caused the nonsignificant differences after the delay. In short, their results could be

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taken to suggest that the gains made by the input group were more stable and the gains for the output group less stable (a finding in Farley, 2001b, that we will review later). In his study on the effect of instruction on the acquisition of object pronouns in Spanish, Salaberry (1997) also offers counterevidence to the results reported by VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). He compares two groupsIP and output processingwith a control. His results show no difference between the two experimental groups on the assessment tasks: a comprehension test (that looked just like one of his input exercises), a production test (that involved translation of sentences with object pronouns), and a narrative production test. Both experimental groups improved significantly on all measures with no difference between them. In Collentine (1998), again two types of instruction were compared: PI and output-oriented instruction. The target item was the Spanish subjunctive in adjectival clauses involving indefinite antecedents. Collentines PI treatment had learners match subjunctive and indicative sentences in Spanish to correct situations or pictures as well as having them respond to sentences containing either subjunctive or indicative verb phrases. The output group completed fill-in-the-blanks pair work in which learners had to construct sentences to describe something and appropriately select the subjunctive or indicative as they formulated their sentences. The explicit phase for both groups was the same. Assessment was made via an interpretation task (in which participants either heard or read a sentence and then matched it to a picture) and via a production task (fill in the blank). Before the pretest and the experimental treatments, Collentine instructed the learners in the form of the subjunctive (but not its use), so that morphology of the subjunctive would not be an issue. Collentines results were as follows: (a) both experimental groups improved significantly after treatment (compared to a control group), and (b) there was no difference between the two experimental groups. Thus, PI was not superior to the output-oriented instruction, although Collentines results do show generalizability of PI effects to other structures.

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In a study on the teaching of the French causative with faire, Allen (2000) attempts to replicate VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) by comparing PI with TI against a control group. As in VanPatten and Cadierno, she measures the effects of instruction via a sentence-level interpretation task (select the picture that goes with what you hear) and a sentence-level production task (write five sentences about what your parents make you do). Her results were as follows: (a) on the interpretation task, both experimental groups made significant gains and were no different from each other, and (b) on the production task, both groups made significant gains, but the traditional group was better than the processing group. She concludes that the results of VanPatten and Cadierno are not generalizable to the French causative (but as in the case of Collentine, 1998, PI effects are generalizable to the French causative irrespective of TI). To summarize, the four studies just reviewed suggest two conclusions: (a) that PI is not necessarily superior to TI in terms of treatment effects; and (b) that regardless of whether or not PI is superior to TI, the effects of PI alone are generalizable to other structures. Because the second conclusion is supportive of PI, I will turn attention to the first conclusion, which apparently runs counter to one of the major conclusions of VanPatten and Cadierno (as well as several other PI studies reviewed previously). Returning to the questions derived from Polio and Gass (1997), we might ask, Are these four studies replications? This question of course leads one to ask what a replication study is. Replications are of two types. The first is an exact replication under the same conditions. In this situation a researcher asks, If I conduct X study exactly as it was done in Y place with Z people, will I get the same results? Although exact replications are not uncommon in the sciences, they are rare if not nonexistent in SLA. So we must examine a second type of replication, a conceptual replication:
Conceptual replications alter various features of the original study and serve the purpose of confirming the generalizability or external validity of the research. Researchers

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will attempt replication to see if the results hold for a different population, in a different setting, or for a different modality. (Polio & Gass, p. 502)

I take this quote to mean that a researcher asks questions such as this: If I conduct X study exactly as it was done in Y place and with Z people, but I change the linguistic focus from D to E, will I get the same results? And another question might be: If I conduct X study exactly as it was done in Y place with Z people, but I alter the explicit information provided to the participants, will I get the same results? A conceptual replication study is one, then, that attempts to duplicate the same treatments, procedures, and so on of a study but may alter a variable because the researcher is examining generalizability vis--vis that one altered variable. Along these lines, then, Benati (2001), Cadierno (1995), Cheng (1995), Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001), VanPatten and Oikennon (1996), VanPatten and Sanz (1995), and VanPatten and Wong (in press) are all conceptual replications of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) because in these studies the researchers attempted to replicate the original study by manipulating the structure, the components of PI, or the assessment tasks, to see if any particular variable would alter the previously observed outcomes. Applying this notion of replication to the studies at hand, one could answer that no, the four studies are not replications (Collentine, 1998, does not claim to be replicating a study in his work and has reiterated this in personal communication, July 20, 2001, but see below). Although DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996) report their study as a replication, their primary questions were not the same as VanPatten and Cadiernos (1993), which I repeat here from above for the ease of the reader:
Does altering the way in which learners process input have an effect on their developing systems? If there is any effect, is it limited solely to processing more input or does instruction in input processing also have an effect on output? If there is an effect, is it the same effect that traditional instruction has (assuming an effect for the latter)? (VanPatten & Cadierno, 1993, p. 229, emphasis added)

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DeKeyser and Sokalski do not offer any explicitly stated research questions but do offer two hypotheses that imply what the questions must be:
1. For the direct object clitic, after instruction the input practice group will improve significantly more than the output practice group on comprehension tasks and rival the output practice group on production tasks. 2. For the conditional forms of the verb, after instruction the output practice group will improve significantly more than the input practice group on production tasks and rival the input practice group on comprehension tasks. (p. 623)

What is important to note in these hypotheses is that there is no mention of (a) altering learners processing strategies or (b) a processing group versus a traditional group. Because DeKeyser and Sokalskis (1996) point of departure is skill theory and not a theory of IP or any theory that claims that input is critical to the development of an underlying mental representation of the language, their (implied) research questions are quite different from VanPatten and Cadiernos (1993). One might suspect, then, that their research methodology would differ as well. And it does. The particular instructional types they use are correctly identifed as input and output practice (because that is what the participants were engaged in), but the treatments were not PI and TI, respectively. This alone is enough to conclude that the study is not a replication of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993), and the results of the study should not be disregarded but should be interpreted along other lines (see below). Again, if we look at research questions or hypotheses, we can examine the content of Salaberrys (1997) study. Only the studys second hypothesis is relevant to the present discussion: H2. The effects of input processing instruction will be similar to the effects of output processing instruction on all tasks (p. 430). At first blush, this hypothesis would lead one to conclude that indeed the study replicates VanPatten and Cadiernos (1993) study, given the use of the term input processing. However, the term output processing leads one to wonder, since output

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instruction in general cannot be equated with TI. An examination of the treatment samples reveals that the study is not a replication, but not for the reason expected: Although the output-processing instruction resembles TI, the IP treatment did not attempt to alter a processing strategy, and Salaberry makes no mention of this aspect of PI.2 Thus, the same treatments as those in VanPatten and Cadierno were not compared. (In addition, a number of procedural and assessment variables were also not the same as in VanPatten & Cadiernos study, further distancing this study as a replication. For discussion on this, see Sanz & VanPatten, 1998, as well as Salaberry, 1998). In a certain sense, Salaberrys study could be considered more a replication of DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996). The results of his study, then, should be interpreted with respect to the results of their study. Allen (2000) asks two research questions for her study that are germane to the present discussion: 1. Will there be any statistical differences in how learners who receive PI, learners who receive TI, and learners who receive no instruction on the French causative interpret sentences containing the French causative? 2. Will there be any statistical differences in how learners who receive PI, learners who receive TI, and learners who receive no instruction on the French causative produce sentences containing the French causative? As formulated, these research questions closely resemble those of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993), and it appears that Allen did conduct a replication. In short, she asks the same questions but has changed the focus to a different structure in a different language. In addition, she clearly identifies a processing problem (the first-noun strategy) and attempts to create materials to push learners away from the strategy. But an examination of her materials reveals that her study cannot be compared directly with VanPatten and Cadiernos because of important changes she made in treatment, procedure, and assessment. First, although Allens

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PI materials overall follow the guidelines for development of such materials (see Lee & VanPatten, 1995; VanPatten, 1993, 1996), her traditional materials do not follow guidelines for TI. During the explicit phase (before any kind of practice), the TI participants heard and interpreted 23 sentences with the French causative. In short, her TI materials are not pure TI materials, but a blend of TI and PI. In addition, her PI activities do not force learners to distinguish between causative faire and noncausative faire. This particular verb is very productive in French and is used to express many everyday events such as to clean house (faire le mnage), to do the dishes (faire la vaisselle), to ski (faire du ski), and to take a trip (faire un voyage). During the PI treatment phase, learners heard only causative sentences and did not have to ascertain whether or not a particular sentence was causative. Thus, one cannot be sure of what the participants were actually learning. It is worth pointing out that in VanPatten and Cadierno, we mixed SVO and OVS/OV sentences in the materials so that learners could not apply some mechanical strategy in completing the activities; they had to pay attention to the sentence in order to determine which word order was being used and who did what to whom. Cadierno (1995) mixed up tenses in her referential activities so that learners had to rely exclusively on the verb ending in each sentence to determine temporal reference (past, present, future). Finally, Allens production assessment measure did not use the same person and number as the interpretation test (which is a problem because the structure is not the same for first- and third-person sentences). (See VanPatten & Wong, in press, for more discussion of this particular studys design and procedure and for results that differ from those of Allen.) Although not claiming to be a replication study, Collentine (1998) does compare what he calls a PI group with an outputoriented group, with the target item being the subjunctive in Spanish in clauses representing indefinite or nonexistent antecedents. The output group, according to Collentine, involved activities that moved from mechanical form-oriented tasks to open-ended, communicative ones (p. 580), a progression that

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sounds very much like TI. However, unlike in other research, Collentine instructed all participants in the subjunctive form prior to the experimental period in order to familiarize them with the morphological properties of this mood. With the exception of the prior instruction on morphological form, Collentines study looks very much like a replication. If we interpret output-oriented to mean TI based on the progression of activity types, then his research questions (although directional) are similar to those of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993): Is PI more effective than outputoriented instruction at promoting the development of learners abilities to interpret the subjunctive? and Is PI more effective than output-oriented instruction at promoting the development of learners abilities to produce the subjunctive where necessary? (p. 579). Collentines assessment measures were a sentence-level interpretation truth value task in which learners had to indicate whether a sentence they heard or read correctly represented a picture they saw. The production test was a fill-in-the-blank sentence-level test. The results indicated no difference between the two treatments; both groups improved (compared to a control) and on both assessment tests. However, unlike in previous research, the gains made were minimal. In VanPatten and Cadierno, for example, when gains were made, participants performance shot up from a mean of just under or around 2 points to 8.5 or 9 points out of 10. In Collentines results, participants scores on the interpretation test went from means of around 1.5 to around 4.3. They fared better in terms of gains on the production test, going from pretest means of around 0.7 to posttest means of 4.1 for the PI group and 5.4 for the output group, but these gains still do not match those of VanPatten and Cadierno (or Cadierno, 1995, for that matter). The question then, as before, is whether or not Collentine (1998) is a replication study. It appears to be, on all measures of what a replication would be. As I examined the treatment materials more closely, however, I noted two things. First, there was no description of the explicit information provided to the participants, and explicit attention drawn to erroneous or nonproductive

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processing strategies does not appear to be present. This may not be a problem, given the results of VanPatten and Oikennon (1996) as well as Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001), because both of these studies demonstrated that the explicit information provided to learners in essence made no difference; results seemed to be due to the structured input activities. (These studies will be discussed below.) Second, the activities themselves seemed heavy. By this I mean that learners had to hold a good deal of information in working memory and process a significant amount of the L2 before indicating comprehension or matching a description to a sentence. These contrast sharply with the minimal information load of VanPatten and Cadiernos (1993) PI activities, in which short sentences had to be matched to pictures or to an English equivalent. Also different is the absence of affective activities in Collentines PI materials. Participants did not respond to statements that related the informational content to themselves (e.g., true for me, applies to me, I agree, and so on). I speculate here that these two differences in the PI materials could contribute to the PI groups less than stellar gains between pre- and posttests in the Collentine study. If this is correct, it suggests that two aspects of PI need to be made clearer and/or more explicit. Although all published guidelines for PI materials (since 1993) discuss using both referential and affective activities, perhaps this aspect of activities development needs to be strengthened, or better yet, perhaps the roles of each within PI (or any instruction, for that matter) need to be investigated. The heaviness of Collentines activities leads me to consider that perhaps activities work best, especially for beginners, when they are informationally simple and do not require a great deal of processing of the L2 for the completion of each item in the activity. The conclusion one might reach, then, is that the results are different in these studies from VanPatten and Cadierno (1993, and studies related to it) not because PI does not generalize to other structures, populations, or situations, but because these were not replications as understood here. Without systematic and theoretically or methodologically motivated changes in a

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studys dependent or independent variables, its design or procedure, or other aspects of the study, a replication study lends itself to differential results. Different results obtained may then be due not to problems with the original study (or problems with the theory on which it is based) but rather to the fact that the replication study is either not researching the same questions as the original study or only looks as though it is. Polio and Gass (1997) make this point when they discuss how to interpret a replications results when these differ from the those of the original study: If the results are not the same . . . one needs detailed information on the original study to determine why. Were the original results merely spurious or is there something in the methodology or subject population that differed significantly? (p. 502). My point is that in the latter part of Polio and Gasss question is the reason for the differential results in the studies under consideration; that is, there are profound differences between the methodology of the replication studies and that of the original. Although one can interpret the results of these four studies differently from the interpretations of the researchers themselves, as I have done here,3 the studies nonetheless raise interesting questions related to PI and skill development as well as possible difficulties in teaching complex syntactic structures to early-stage learners. I will take these questions up in a later section. I turn attention now to the issue of explicit information.
Are the Effects of PI Due to Different Explicit Information?

Another limitation of the original VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study is that the processing and traditional groups received different explicit information before practice. The processing group followed the guidelines for the PI as presented earlier: Paradigms were broken up, and participants were also warned about invalid processing strategies. The traditional group received a traditional explanation, and no mention of processing strategies was made. Our suspicion was that the explicit information really

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did not contribute anything significant to the outcomes, so in a follow-up study we attempted to tease out explicit information as a variable. In VanPatten and Oikennon (1996) we compared three groups: one that received PI exactly as in the original VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study; another that received the structured input activities only, with no prior explicit information and no explanation during the activities; and another that received explicit information only with no structured input activities. This last group received the explanation on one day, and the explanation was repeated on the second day (recall that treatment in the original study lasted 2 days), but they engaged in reading activities unrelated to the structure. Again we used the same assessment tests as in the original study. Our results were clear. Both the regular-processing group and the structured-input-only group improved significantly but were not different from each other. The explanation-only group showed no improvement at all. Our conclusion was that the effects of PI are due not to the explicit information provided to learners but to the particular nature of the structured input activities and how these push them to make form-meaning connections because the input sentences have been manipulated in particular ways. A recent study using computer-assisted language learning (CALL) found similar results. Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001) set out to test whether explicit feedback, a component of CALL that is often championed by advocates of technology in language teaching, is necessary or helpful to learners. They chose PI as the method of instruction and used the same materials as VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) and VanPatten and Sanz (1995), as well as VanPatten and Oikennon (1996), but transferred them to digital media and updated the drawings used in the activities and testing sections. Computer delivery of treatment and testing allowed for randomization and control of all variables involved. They tested four groups using the variables [+/ explanation] and [+/ explicit feedback]. (All groups, regardless of the combination of these variables, received the same structured input as practice.) The

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first group was [+ explanation] (i.e., explicit information about the language and how to process it in the input) and [+explicit feedback] (defined as telling learners not only whether or not an answer is correct, but what the problem is, if the answer is not correct). The second group was [explanation] and [explicit feedback] (i.e, they got structured input only, with only indications of whether their answers were right or wrong). The third group was [+explanation] but [explicit feedback]. The fourth group was [explanation] but [+explicit feedback]. All groups received negative feedback in terms of being told whether or not their answers were correct. Sanz and Morgan-Shorts results showed that all groups improved significantly on the three assessment tasks (interpretation and two production tasks: a sentence completion task and video-retelling task) from pre- to posttests (there were three posttests, as in the original VanPatten and Cadierno [1993] study). What is more, they found that no group was better than any other on any task. In short, neither explicit information nor explicit feedback seemed to be crucial for a change in performance; practice in decoding structured input alone (as in the second group) seems to be sufficient. Benati (in press) reports similar findings in his study with the Italian future tense. In his study, he compared regular PI group with a structured-input-only group and an explicit-informationonly group. His results show that the explicit-information-only group improved slightly from pre- to posttest measures but that both PI and structured-input-only groups improved much more, and the improvement of each group was not significantly different from that of the other, according to the results of his ANOVA. However, both treatment groups were significantly better than the explicit-information-only group. These findings held for both interpretation and production tasks. Benatis results then suggest a major, if not causative, role for the structured input activities of PI and only a minor role, if any, for explicit information.

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Are the Effects of PI Observable With Different Assessment Tasks?

Another limitation of our original study is that we used sentence-level tests only. Cheng (1995) showed some effects for PI (as well as TI) on a composition task (reviewed above). In VanPatten and Sanz (1995) we set out to see what would be the effects of PI as measured by three kinds of output tests. In this study we compared PI group to a control group using the same materials as in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993), with the target once again object pronouns and word order. Although we also used the interpretation test from VanPatten and Cadierno, our output tests included not only a sentence-level test but also a question-and-answer test (based on pictures) and a video narration test. We also administered the output tests in two modes: written and oral. We were especially interested in the video narration task, because of the complex cognitive activity it represents. In this kind of task, participants must provide all vocabulary, all syntax, and all grammatical features on their own without any prompts. We found that the control group did not improve on any of the tests we used. The PI group improved significantly on the interpretation test and on the sentence-level test in both modes (written and oral). For some reason, the participants did not attempt to produce many object pronouns with the question-and-answer test, opting instead to simply repeat nouns in their answers (e.g., Whats he going to do with the banana? He wants to eat the banana. as opposed to He wants to eat it.) However, on the video narration test, participants did attempt to produce object pronouns. Their gains were significant in the written mode but just missed significance in the oral mode, and on all tests, the PI participants performed better on the written tests than on the oral. I discussed Sanz and Morgan-Short (2001) above in terms of the role of explicit information. Relevant here is that the authors included in their computer-oriented study the same assessment tasks used in VanPatten and Sanzs (1995) study. Again, the participants improved on all tasks, even the video retelling.

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It appears that the effects of PI obtain in different types of output tests and are not limited to sentence-level tests. As can be expected, written tests produce performance superior to that of oral tests (see Sanz, 1998).
Are the Effects of PI Different From Those of Other Types of Instruction?

Farley (2001a) compared the relative effects of PI with meaning-based output instruction (MOI). As in previous research, the PI group only interpreted sentences (via structured input activities) and did not produce any sentences with the subjunctive. Farley based the PI materials on P1b of VanPattens (1996) model. A pilot study revealed that learners of Spanish do not pay attention to mood markers on verbs for any semantic information and rely instead on the lexical information contained in the main clause. Thus Farleys referential activities pushed learners to attend to subordinate clauses without a main clause and had the learners indicate what the possible main clause could have been (or vice versa). Farleys affective activities had learners combine main and subordinate clauses to express doubt and belief about various people, places, events, and so on or to check off beliefs, doubts, and so on from lists. Unlike TI, MOI includes no mechanical drills and is based on the tenets of structured output activities proposed in Lee and VanPatten (1995) and first mentioned in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). In Farleys (2001a) MOI materials, participants created subordinate clauses using subjunctive or indicative forms based on the main clause triggers they heard (or read). For example, participants might have heard (translated from the Spanish) I dont think that dogs . . . and on a sheet of paper would see (to be) intelligent. They would then have to indicate what the person must be saying by using the correct form of the verb in parentheses. Other more affective activities had them expressing their own beliefs or doubts, putting them in more control of the subordinate clause.

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Both the PI and the MOI groups had 2 days of instruction on the Spanish subjunctive with noun clauses and expressions of doubt and negation. Farley (2001a) assessed outcomes using a pretest/posttest design, with one posttest administered 1 month after treatment. The tests consisted of an interpretation test based on the PI materials (e.g, Can you determine what the speaker must have said initially if all you hear is this second part of the sentence? and a production test based on the MOI materials (e.g., Complete the sentence . . .). Farleys (2001a) results differed from those in the previous studies comparing PI with TI. His results showed that the PI and MOI groups improved significantly on both the interpretation and the production tests, with no difference between them. Thus, PI was not superior to MOI; neither was MOI superior to PI. Again, because this study points to a different direction for PI-oriented research, I will take it up again in the next section. However, it is worth pointing out here that these results also differ from another study conducted by Farley. Farley (2001b) used the same design, procedure, and target structure as the 2001a study. The results of the second study, however, were a bit different from those of the first. Although both groups improved on the interpretation task in the second study, only the PI group maintained its performance on a delayed task. The MOI group declined in performance, and the decline was not traceable to a sampling problem similar to that found in the VanPatten and Wong (in press) study. Thus, PI did prove to be superior to TI in the same way it did in the Buck (2000) study.
Summary

In general, it seems that the conclusions of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) hold overall, namely, that PI is superior to TI. In two studies in which we see an initial gain on interpretation tasks for the TI group or the MOI group, the gains were lost by the time a delayed posttest was administered, whereas this was not the case for the PI groups (accounting for the attrition problem in the

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VanPatten & Wong, in press, study). We also see generalizability to other structures, that a causative role of explicit information in PI is minimal if any, and that the effects of PI show up on a variety of assessment tasks. I have argued that replication studies reporting counterevidence can be reinterpreted if we take a close look at the differences in methodology between them and the original study. We also, see, however that the question of PIs being overall superior to a completely meaning-based approach to outputoriented instruction (Farleys MOI) resulted in conflicting findings calling for more research on this issue. I now turn attention to some remaining issues.

Remaining Issues
One of the issues in PI research that has been ignored to date is that of skill development. Although I argued earlier that the conclusions of DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996) could not be applied to PI, their findings are quite important for supporting the idea that skills develop when skills are practiced. Theories in SLA that deal with the development of an interlanguage grammar or underlying mental representation often have little if anything to say about how learners go about making productive use of those grammars (a point underscored in Pienemanns research). With this said, one aspect of the VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study that needs to be made clear is that it used only accuracy measures to determine any effects due to treatment. Since no measures of response or reaction time were used, we cannot determine to what extent there were differential outcomes among the groups regarding accuracy and speed, the two underlying components of skill development (Schmidt, 1992). The PI group might have been able to produce a structure but produced it more slowly than the TI group; or they might have had faster response times on the interpretation task and slower times on the production task, a finding that would reflect the absence of skill development. In short, we know that the PI participants could access a form or structure, but we have no idea about how this might translate

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ultimately into fluency and accuracy during normal speech. However, given the research questions and framework in which we operated, we did not need such measures, and our conclusions reflect this:
What seems to have happened in this study is that processing instruction altered the way in which the subjects processed input, which in turn had an effect on the developing system and what the subjects could access for production. (Van Patten & Cadierno, 1993, p. 238, emphasis added) Instruction as direct intervention on learners strategies in input processing should have a significant effect on the learners developing system. The results of the present study suggest that this is so. (p. 240, emphasis added) We do not advocate abandoning communicative tasks and tasks that provide opportunities for making output. . . . [I]t is clear that learners need to develop their abilities in accessing the developing system for fluent and accurate production. (p. 239, emphasis added)

One could look at the original VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) study juxtaposed to the DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996) study, for example, and reasonably say, I understand how PI could alter the learners mental representation of the grammar, but I dont see how PI could address anything related to fluency and the development of oral skills. This view, I would argue, is valid. Future research should incorporate reaction time measures when investigating the effects of instruction. Subtle yet important differences between groups might surface with these measures that do not surface with simple accuracy measures. On a different issue, an anonymous reviewer of this article raised the following question: Could it be that some of the replication studies with different results conformed to some earlier conceptualization of PI? Put in other words, the counterevidence studies claiming to be replications might not be faulted on methodological grounds, because the concept of PI has evolved since VanPatten and Cadiernos original (1993) study, and thus we are

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using a more developed, more elaborated, or even changed conceptualization of PI now than what these researchers had to follow. This query seems reasonable, until one is reminded of three points. The first of these points involves the research questions asked by the various studies. As we saw above, two of the three replication studies were not actually answering the same questions as VanPatten and Cadierno, so they really didnt have to follow VanPatten and Cadiernos treatments and design faithfully. That they are reported as replications is unfortunate and obscures this point as well as the important findings they offer on other matters. The second point is that the essence of PI is found in VanPatten and Cadiernos (1993) question about altering learners processing strategies. Our hypothesis was that if we altered an invalid or misleading strategy by pushing learners to process input correctly, we would get a change in the learners grammar. We operationalized this via PI, which is an interventionist treatment that seeks to alter the way in which learners process a form or structure in the input. In fact, what has always distinguished PI from any other approach to instruction is its foundation in a theory of IP. From IP we find out what learners are doing wrong or not at all; that is, we find out their processing strategies. We then relate these strategies to formal features of language to see what formal features might be affected by which strategies. We subsequently design an appropriate pedagogical intervention. As stated in VanPatten and Cadierno, Processing instruction, on the other hand, involved (a) teaching the subjects how to process OVS strings correctly, both when the O consisted of a full noun and when it consisted of a clitic object pronoun, and (b) having the students respond to the informational content of OV(S) strings (p. 231; see also the activity type descriptions therein). Without this critical aspect of the intervention, it is fair to say that other studies use an input-oriented treatment, but one that is not PI. Most important, however, is the third point. Even if the treatment descriptions in VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) were sufficiently vague as to make replication not possible, VanPatten (1993) articulates the fundamentals of PI, which have not changed

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since that study was published (see also Lee and VanPatten, 1995; VanPatten, 1996). These fundamentals include those described earlier (explicit information about the structure, explicit information about processing strategies, structured input activities, both referential and affective) in addition to a set of guidelines for developing structured input activities that includes the following guideline: Keep the learners processing strategies in mind. What has changed over the years is the elaboration and exemplification of these fundamentals, mostly because we have realized from our working with new instructors and from reading the research that the profession needed more examples, needed examples from different languages, and needed to understand especially what we meant by altering learners processing strategies, a point that we find continues to escape many. But PI itself has not changed. Turning our attention to a different issue, another reviewer of this article suggested that VanPatten and Cadierno (1993) confounded input with PI and output with TI, and therefore it is only reasonable to expect that attempts at replication would refer to input versus output practice. In short, the confusion is caused by our conflation of constructs (PI with input and TI with output). This may be a valid point in that one could ask, Why did you pick TI? Why didnt you pick some other kind of output instruction? My response is this: We used TI because that is the dominant grammar instruction type used in foreign language instruction in the United States, if not around the world. (The teaching of English as a second language most likely is much more meaningoriented than either English as a foreign language or foreign language teaching in this country, as pointed out by a reviewer of another article.) Cadierno and I examined 10 major Spanish textbooks before conducting our study, and only one did not employ the methodology of TI in its treatment of grammar. And the situation has not changed. Only recently my coauthor on another article, Wynne Wong, and I sat in on separate workshops at different institutions during which language teaching professionals informed first-time graduate teaching assistants that explanation

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and (mechanical) drills were necessary for language acquisition. And in the 10 years that I have been invited to language departments and regional conferences and have talked about PI, I have often received terribly concerned looks from practicing teachers and some language program directors accompanied by the question, But dont they need to do some drill to get the structure under control? TI, then, as conceptualized and operationalized in our studies, is no straw man; it is alive and well in a tremendous number of language classes and textbooks in the United States if not elsewhere. Our point, then, was not to contrast input with output, but to question the dominant approach and contrast it with another that was grounded in theoretical constructs of SLA (input and IP). For this reason we have stood by our original claim that PI is better than TI. We have never claimed that input is better than output in general, nor that output plays no role in SLA. Indeed, we have underscored the need for output practice and for self-expression during communicative activities, as some of the quotations earlier in this section demonstrate. (Again, see VanPatten, 2000b and 2002, for more discussion on the roles of input and output in SLA.) It is true that in our original study we criticized TI for putting the cart before the horse, that is, for being an instructional approach that attempted to manipulate output, and we did question instructional approaches in general that attempt to manipulate output as a means to alter the nature of the developing system (VanPatten and Cadierno, 1993, p. 227). It is understandable, then, that some readers might think that we were researching input versus output. What is less understandable is maintaining this interpretation after reading our discussion and conclusion, unless one liberally interprets TI as meaning any kind of output-based instruction or PI as any kind of input-based instruction. This reading of the treatments was clearly not our intention. Because of space limitations, it is not possible to treat fully here the roles of input and output in SLA. I have attempted to do this in VanPatten (2002). It is important to mention at least in passing that perhaps the question is not really input versus

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output, but rather our assumptions about SLA in general. For example, my assumption is that SLA is special and not like other kinds of learning and that the result of SLA is an implicit system consisting of a network of lexical items and forms as well as an abstract system of constraints on syntax. (I make no assumptions about phonology or other aspects of the linguistic system.) It is not clear, except in the case of DeKeyser and Sokalski (1996), what assumptions underlie the claims of those who do not believe in a fundamental role for input in SLA or that SLA is different from other kinds of learning. For DeKeyser and Sokalski, SLA is not special and is subject to the laws of any kind of human skill learning. For me and for those who agree with my conceptualization of the underlying system, input provides the raw data upon which internal mechanisms act. For DeKeyser and Sokalski, for example, input is necessary only for the development of comprehension skills; there is no underlying system, but rather sets of procedural knowledge, one for comprehension and one for production. If this reading is correct, then the debate is not about input versus output in SLA (instructed or otherwise), but about an underlying system versus skills (or something else). Before concluding I would like to return to the Farley studies (2001a, 2001b), since they clearly set out to test the effects of PI against a completely meaning-based output-oriented instruction and thus speak to issues beyond PI versus TI. Farleys results, as reported above, do not parallel those of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993). In Farley (2001a), both groups improved after treatment, and both improved on the two different assessments: sentencelevel interpretation and sentence-level production. In Farley (2001b), both groups improved on both measures, but the MOI groups performance declined over time on the interpretation task, whereas the PI group showed no decline. This leaves us without a clear statement to make regarding the equal effects of PI and MOI. But for the sake of argument, I will assume that the effects of PI and MOI are essentially the same (i.e., the results of Farleys 2001a study). Again, without reaction times to examine possible differential effects in speed on the tests, it is difficult to make

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conclusions about PI versus MOI. Perhaps more important, though, is an aspect of the study that Farley addresses quite clearly as a limitation. Since he sought ecological validity, he conducted the research in classrooms (as is done in most PI studies) rather than in a laboratory setting. As a result, although the PI group was a pure input group, the MOI group was not. Each and every time a participant uttered a sentence, including the instructor, it served as potential input for others in the classroom. (One of the tenets of structured output, the concept on which Farley based his output materials, is that someone must respond to the content of the learners output so that an emphasis on meaning is maintained and the learner is not producing for the sake of producing. See Lee and VanPatten, 1995, chap. 6.) Although Farley did not analyze the output, based on the activities the MOI group was performing, their output sentences would have often looked like structured input sentences in the PI group. Similarly to Allens (2000) study, then, the MOI was a mixture of input and output. Farley himself suggests that his results are due to what he calls the incidental input of the MOI group. For the same reasons, his results are different from those of studies in which my colleagues and I have used TI. With TI there is no incidental input (or very little) because of the types of practices used (except in the case of the Benati [2001] study, in which the author decreased the number of mechanically oriented activities and added others that resemble structured output activities). Farleys explanation of the performance of the MOI group may seem ad hoc to some readers, but what makes it reasonable is that it (a) considers what is actually happening in the classroom in terms of the linguistic environment and (b) links the results to the very way in which SLA theory and research have suggested that learning happens, by way of input. If the MOI class periods were more communicative than typical TI equivalents and if this communication was built around a particular structure, then these class periods must be fostering acquisition in some way, as the language produced in the classroom is potential input for learners.

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A contrasting and also reasonable conclusion of Farleys (2001a) study is that since both the PI and the MOI groups were meaning-based throughout the treatment phase, perhaps it is the meaning-oriented nature of instruction that is most important. As long as classes and materials are meaning-oriented and avoid mechanical and display language, acquisition is fostered, and PI is no better than any other meaning-based instruction with a form focus. I would not disagree with this statement at all, at least as far as one of the Farley studies is concerned. I would add a caveat, however: that PI appears (so far!) almost to guarantee some kind of positive effect. This cannot be said about other meaning-based approaches. They simply need to be researched (and replications done, of course, as Farley clearly shows in his own work). I offer here a case in point. Text enhancement is a meaning-based approach to focus on form with an input orientation. In text enhancement, a targeted form is highlighted throughout a written text to make it more salient. Learners read for meaning, and as they do so they should notice the highlighted forms as well. The results of this technique are mixed, if not disappointing, as demonstrated in results and the literature review in one recent dissertation (Wong, 2000). And in one case (Overstreet, 1998) it was found that text enhancement interfered with comprehension, which would suggest that the meaning-oriented nature of the treatment was being compromised by the focus on form, precisely what we dont want in acquisition. In acquisition, an important job of the learner is to make form-meaning connections in the input. As one last point, I would like to return to the Collentine (1998) and Farley (2001a, 200b) studies. I remind the reader that Collentines study does appear to be a replication with different results from previous research. I concluded above that the types of materials used in the PI treatment suggest a need to clarify what constitutes good activities for beginning learners in terms of processing load. But the results of one of Farleys studies (2001a) are similar to Collentines, and the PI materials are very similar to those used in previous research. What these two studies have in common is the linguistic structure, the Spanish subjunctive

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(albeit different uses of the subjunctive). It may be that the superiority of PI to TI is not generalizable to this particular structure. By the same token, the constant superiority of PI over TI with a number of other structures and forms and in different languages leaves us begging the question Why? Collentine (in press) suggests that the stubbornness of the subjunctive may be due to syntactic development. Not only are learners acquiring mood (a semantic notion) and the formal means by which it is conveyed, but they are also learning how to process clauses in input as well as output. We have seen in research on German L2, for example, that word order in clauses is acquired in the last phase of acquisition of word order in general (see Pienemann, 1998, and others), and in the research on the acquisition of whquestions in English, it is known that word order in embedded questions (e.g., Did you tell me why Mary is late?) comes late. Before engaging in such speculation about the difficulties of the subjunctive, it would prove useful first to investigate whether any other type of instruction leads to any higher levels of improvement with this structure. With that kind of research in hand, we could better determine the cause underlying the results in the studies currently under consideration. If the subjunctive does not respond to other treatments differently, then the linguistic feature is indeed a stubborn one.

Conclusion
I hope to have argued reasonably for the psycholinguistic validity and practical utility of PI, that it is unique as a particular type of input-oriented approach to instruction on formal features because of its attempt to alter processing strategies, and that the challenges made to it must be interpreted with caution. We now have almost a decade of research that has examined different variables and that has included a number of replication studies. The evidence overall supports the initial findings of VanPatten and Cadierno (1993): PI is superior to TI. As we continue our research agenda looking at other aspects of PI (e.g., long-term effects),

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others are encouraged to conduct replication studies as well and to continue to challenge us. As part of conceptual replication studies, those in which PI is contrasted with some other type of output-oriented instruction would be very useful. PI clearly helps learners to make form-meaning connections for acquisition, but at least one study demonstrated that one instructional type, MOI, seems to be as good as PI in terms of improved performance on assessment tasks. Unfortunately, replication studies in general are not as valued as original research in cases of tenure and promotion, and this may be why so few are conducted to begin with (Polio & Gass, 1997). Perhaps the big challenge, then, is to change this perception in our academies so that replication (in any area of SLA) finds its rightful place in the discourse of our profession.
Revised version accepted 15 February 2002

Notes
1

I thank Alessandro Benati for sharing his materials with me during the development of his study. 2 Salaberry (1997) claims to follow the guidelines in Lee and VanPatten (1995) closely, but there is no evidence of this in the treatment materials. 3 It is clear in the case of the Salaberry (1997) study that we do not agree on the differences between his study and ours and what the results of the two studies actually mean. See Sanz and VanPatten (1998) and Salaberry (1998) for a discussion.

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