Replication and Expansion: Activity Type in Processing Instruction's Structured Input

In seeking to both confirm previous conclusions and expand the literature of the field with a different group of participants, McNulty (2012) was (partially) replicated. Three instructional interventions were designed to ascertain which activity type was responsible for learner gains. One treatment group (R) included referential-only practice activities. The second group (A) included affective-only practice activities and the third group (RA) was comprised of a balance of referential and affective activities which was subsequently eliminated in the analysis due to a lack of participants for this intervention. The instructional interventions were delivered via an open-source Moodle platform. The targeted grammatical feature for this processing instruction (PI) study was the subjunctive/indicative contrast after cuando, "when." The acquisitional challenges with this particular feature result both from the mood alternation that is allowed as well as five identified Input Processing principles. University participants (n = 26) and high school participants (n = 29) followed a pretest/post-test/delayed post-test (after 2-8 weeks) design to measure learner gains on production and interpretation tasks. Repeated measures ANOVAs were used to further analyze the scores from these tasks by total, subjunctive, and indicative items at two time periods: from pretest to post-test and from post-test to delayed post-test. Findings indicate that the type of Structured Input activity is not statistically significant despite the modifications from McNulty (2012).