The Roles of Structured Input Activities in Processing Instruction and the Kinds of Knowledge They Promote

This study aimed to isolate the effects of the two input activities in Processing Instruction: referential activities, which force learners to focus on a form and its meaning, and affective activities, which contain exemplars of the target form and require learners to process sentence meaning. One hundred and twenty 12‐year‐old Taiwanese learners of English as a foreign language were assigned to one of four groups: Referential + Affective, Referential only, Affective only, or Control. The treatments were computer‐based. Pretests, posttests, and delayed posttests, including a timed grammaticality judgment, a written gap‐fill, an oral picture narration, and a short semistructured conversation, measured learning of the –ed past tense verb inflection. Findings suggested that referential activities were responsible for the learning gains observed, that affective activities did not provide additional benefits in terms of learning –ed , and that the gains observed displayed some broadly defined characteristics of explicit knowledge.