Processing instruction through structured input activities and output practice activities : A study on causative insruction

This study was conducted to compare the short term and long term gains ofTurkish students who received structured input activities (experimental group A) acombination of structured input activities and output practice activities (experimentalgroup B) and the activities in their textbook Focus on Grammar, High IntermediateLevel (control group) to learn English causatives. For this study, 3 classes of 54students at the School of Foreign Languages at Anadolu University participated.Three different instructional packets and a pre test, post-test and delayed tests wereadministrated. The test consisted of three parts: controlled production part,recognition part and free production part. Two days after the pre-test, the students ineach group studied the English causatives for three 45-minute class periods. Then,they were administrated the post test immediately after the treatments and a delayedtest 5 weeks later. The pre-test post-test and delayed test scores of students werecompared between groups through one-way ANOVA.As a result of this study, the following results were obtained:a. In terms of short-term effects, structured input activities are significantlymore effective than the activities in the textbook, Focus on Grammar indeveloping recognition skill. There is no significant difference between them inthe development of production skill in both short and long term. In addition, thedifference observed in the recognition skill in the short term disappeared in thelong term. However, the results of the group who received structured inputactivities was a little higher.b. In terms of both short term and long term effects, structured input activities+ output practice activities is more effective than the activities in the textbook,Focus on Grammar, in the development of production and recognition skills.c. In terms of the development of production skill, receiving structured inputactivities +output practice activities is more effective than receiving onlystructured input activities in the short term but this difference between themdisappears in time. Delayed test scores show that there is not a significantdifference between these two treatments in terms of the development ofproduction, recognition and free production skills. However, the group whoreceived structured input activities +output practice activities scored slightlyhigher than the group who received structured input activities only.d. In terms of free production, the advantage that structured input activities andstructured input activities + output practice activities provide is that thestudents who learned the causative structure through these treatments used avariety of causative verbs (make, have, get, let, help) in their paragraphs,instead of using the verb given in the instruction.