ABSTRACT

This chapter begins with a clarification about processing instruction (PI). Scholars working with PI understand that language is a complex, abstract, and implicit mental representation that cannot be captured with the simple rules that are typical of textbooks and much of instructed second language acquisition (SLA) research. Under PI, acquisition consists of three necessary ingredients: input; Universal Grammar (UG) and internal mental architecture; and processing mechanisms that mediate between input and UG/internal architecture. Within the scholarship on pedagogical interventions and focus on form techniques available, PI is one of the most widely researched. At the same time, it is the intervention with the most robust results in terms of effects, while also studied in the most contexts, with the most languages, with a variety of intersections of processing problems and target forms. At the same time, pedagogical interventions such as text enhancement, input flood, dictogloss, and many others do recognize the role of input in language acquisition.