Processing Instruction in French: The Roles of Explicit Information and Structured Input

VanPatten and Oikkenon (1996) set out to investigate whether it was the EI or SI activities that were responsible for the superior results reported in the empirical studies on PI. The researchers found that SI activities were the causative factor and that EI was not necessary or even beneficial for learners to make significant gains on sentence level tests that measured their acquisition of word order and object pronouns in Spanish. In other words, whether learners had EI or not did not have an impact on the results.