This presentation reports the results of a study investigating the effects of bilingualism in instructed L2 input processing. The target form was the numeral classifier in Mandarin Chinese. This presentation will be relevant for researchers interested in the effects of monolingualism and bilingualism instructed SLA.
Bilingualism has been associated with lifelong cognitive benefits that correlate with facilitated achievements in subsequent language learning. Second language (L2) instruction as well can promote the development of cognitive abilities involved in language learning, and among these, L2 input processing. Crucial to L2 acquisition, input processing is the ability to associate forms detected in communicative language (input) to their meaning. A pedagogical intervention called Processing Instruction (PI) was specifically designed to support input processing. This input-oriented pedagogical technique relies on one main component: activities that give learners practice with input processing called structured input activities (SI). Such activities can be preceded by explicit information (EI) about a target form. To date, whether and in what ways PI might interact with the proposed advantages of being bilingual for L2 grammar acquisition is an issue that has not been adequately addressed. This study investigates how fast and accurately monolingual and bilingual learners who receive training with PI can process a linguistic form in Mandarin Chinese. Participants are all unfamiliar with Chinese and have no prior knowledge of the target forms: the classifiers ba ("held by hand") and tai ("heavy, mechanical, electronic"). The monolingual participants are native speakers of English, and the bilingual participants are speakers of English and a Romance language. They are sub-divided into two treatment groups: PI (EI+SI), and a control, output-oriented treatment. The dependent variables include learners' onset of accurate form-processing as measured by trials-to-criterion, and improvement over time as measured by a sentence-level interpretation post-test and a sentence-level interpretation post-test. Findings from this laboratory experiment will offer a valuable contribution to L2 research as a dynamic and interdisciplinary field. They will, indeed, be relevant to research in instructed SLA while also informing research on learners' individual differences and bilingualism.
