The Differential Role of Comprehension and Production Practice

Abstract

In the last 10 years, the ideas that second language learning requires a certain amount of focus on form, and that form should to some extent be learned explicitly, have been steadily gaining ground (see, e.g., Doughty & Williams, 1998; Norris & Ortega, 2000). What exact instructional activities this implies, however, remains the subject of considerable controversy.In the early 199Os, VanPatten and his collaborators published several studies suggesting that a type of form‐focused input activities called processing instruction were all that was necessary, and that form‐focused output activities were not useful, given that students who had had either input or output practice performed similarly on subsequent production tasks, whereas students used to input practice performed better on comprehension tasks than the output practice group. In a study published around the same time as the present one, VanPatten and Oikkenon (1996) even argued that not only output practice but even grammar explanation is not necessary provided students receive processing instruction.The vast majority of studies carried out by VanPatten and his collaborators, however, including the (1996) study just mentioned, dealt with the problem of learning the morphology and word order of Spanish clitic pronouns by English speakers. In our (1996) article we argued‐and we still do‐that the results of studies by VanPatten and collaborators are to some extent due t o this choice of structure and therefore not generalizable.Our results with 82 first‐year students of Spanish as a second language indicated that the relative effectiveness of production versus comprehension practice depended on the morphosyntactic complexity of the structure in question as well as on the delay between practice and testing. The findings basically reflected the predictions of skill acquisition theory that input practice is better for comprehension skills, and output practice for production skills, but these patterns were obscured when both testing time and the morphosyntactic nature of the structure in question favored one skill or the other.Not much research has been published since 1996 that addresses these specific issues empirically. Allen (2000), however, in a study on the learning of causative structures in French, reached the same conclusion we had in 1996. In that study, traditional instruction was found as effective as processing instruction in enabling learners to comprehend and more effective than processing instruction in enabling learners to produce the French causative. It appears again, then, that which kind of instructional activity is most effective at bringing about comprehension or production skill depends on the morphosyntactic nature of the structure at issue, and that the advantage of (specific forms of) input practice over output practice for learning Spanish clitic pronouns cannot be generalized to other structures.