Grammar Acquisition and Processing Instructions: Secondary and Cumulative Effects

Research on Processing Instruction has so far investigated the primary effects of Processing Instruction. In this book the results of a series of experimental studies investigating possible secondary and cumulative effects of Processing Instruction on the acquisition of French, Italian and English as a second language will be presented. The results of the three experiments have demonstrated that Processing Instruction not only provides learners the direct or primary benefit of learning to process and produce the morphological form on which they received instruction, but also a secondary benefit in that they transferred that training to processing and producing another morphological form on which they had received no instruction.

Alessandro G. Benati is Head of Languages Department at the University of Greenwich in the UK. He has researched and taught in the area of second language acquisition and processing instruction. He is co-author with James Lee of the following books: Delivering Processing Instruction in classrooms and in Virtual Contexts; Second Language Processing: An analysis of Theory, Problems and Possible Solutions.

James F. Lee is Head of Department of Spanish and Latin American Studies at the University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. He is the author of Task and Communicating in Language Classrooms.