ABSTRACT
The chapters in this volume, along with previously published work by Bill VanPatten and his collaborators, constitute an important body of empirical and theoretical research. It is important in part because of its sheer size, now several books and many individual papers. It is important too because of the number of linguistic phenomena that have been investigated: semantic roles and their instantiation in word order or clitic and weak pronouns or the complex causative construction, present, past or future tense marking, mood (subjunctive marking), animacy marking, negative polarity items, or the choice of the correct Spanish copula ser or estar. It is important because what began as a mainly English L1Spanish L2 enterprise has moved well beyond that group of learners to include other language pairs with different learning problems arising from unique formmeaning mappings. The collective evidence presented suggests, quite convincingly in my view, that Processing Instruction is a viable alternative to other foreign language instructional paradigms that either eschew a focus on form altogether or that resort to more traditional forms of metalinguistic instruction.1 In my commentary, I focus on the model of Input Processing that underlies the hypotheses of the Processing Instruction approach. VanPatten and his colleagues have insisted from the outset that modeling input processing and understanding why Processing Instruction works is just as important as demonstrating that it does. It is important that pedagogical activities be rooted in a viable psychology of language perception and learning. I fully agree with this
logic. The essential point of my contribution is to argue the following point: We know far less about speech perception and language processing among second language learners than we need to know to meet this basic requirement. We know little indeed about the interaction of processing and learning mechanisms. And we know very little about how learning from input links to the behavior observable in learners through an analysis of their speech output and writing. Serious advances will have to be made on all these fronts to place the Processing Instruction approach on a solid footing.
