Dr Alessandro Benati
‘s presentation consisted of three parts in which he explained in detail the
study of
the effects of Processing Instruction on school-age learners and
adult native speakers of German.
In the first part, Dr
Benati gave a brief account of the background and the motivation of the study
where he also defined the terms Processing Input and Processing Instruction, as
stated in Van Pattens’ current theory of Input Process. The input that is actually
processed is called Intake and is closely related to the internal strategies by
which the L2 learners derive intake and correct the information. Dr Benati explained
that studies have tended to use adults while he and J.F.Lee have used
12-13year- olds in their research, in their search to make Processing
Instruction effective, pointing out that further research has to be conducted.
In the second part of this presentation, he
went on to explain the research design and how it had been conducted. -The aims
of the studies were to address the role that age might play in the results generated
by processing instruction (P.I.) He demonstrated tables containing the
participants linguistic features, age and the material they were given, e.g. sentence-level
interpretation tasks, based on explicit information input activities, e.g. the
passive construction the past tense and the 3rd person in the
present tense.
During the third part,
he demonstrated the results and the conclusions highlighting the fact that both
adult and child groups had very similar results in Instruction and Detention (retaining
their ability of comprehension), and secondly the limitation of this study
which were the limited size and the short period that detention was measured (2-3
weeks).
By manipulating the
Input of language we might focus on the meaning thus forcing learners to make connections so that
language grows is what he concluded and I believe is the main key element of
teaching a foreign language successfully.
There was room for
discussion after Dr Benati ‘s thorough presentation where a few questions were
asked and some issues were clarified.
Dr Benati's book Studies of Language Acquisition (SOLA) is only one among his many
publications and articles emphasizing
the connection between
grammatical forms and language acquisition , a valuable tool to
both teachers and students of Applied
Linguistics.
By Fani Dafnopatidou
Interviewed by our Roving Reporter: Theodora Papapanagiotou
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