title: Exploring a combined input and output-oriented teaching approach to develop Chinese secondary school students’ English grammatical knowledge: a classroom-based experimental study
Creators: name: Li, Xiaobo
Publisher: name: University of Reading
Year: 2024

description: English grammar teaching in Chinese secondary schools emphasizes a connection between 
grammatical form and meaning, a crucial skill for acquiring grammatical knowledge. 
However, existing research on interventions to achieve this goal remains limited. 
Processing instruction (PI), based on the Input Processing (IP) Theory, offers a promising 
approach. Its structured input activities encourage learners to analyse grammatical features 
by working out the meaning they stand for, potentially establishing form-meaning 
connections. Nevertheless, PI has not been widely explored in the Chinese teaching context. 
Additionally, while prior studies exploring the effects of PI and meaning-based output 
instruction (MOI) have yielded interesting and conflicting results, the effects of a combined 
input-based PI with output-based MOI have not been fully studied yet. Thus, the present 
study addresses this gap by comparing the effects of PI and MOI both in combination and 
isolation among Chinese secondary school learners (aged 13-14).
A mixed-method explanatory design was employed. Four intact classes from two 
secondary schools (n=167) were randomly assigned to the PI, MOI, PI+MOI, and Control 
groups. All three intervention groups received the same explicit information about the target 
structure, namely the English passive voice. The PI group received structured input 
activities, the MOI group involved structured output activities requiring learners to produce 
the target feature and the PI + MOI group contained half structured input activities from PI 
and half structured output activities from MOI. The control group did not receive instruction
regarding English passive voice, but they had their regular school English lessons. Learners' 
passive voice acquisition was assessed through pre-, post-, and delayed post-tests (sentence-
and discourse-level receptive and productive tests). A vocabulary test was administered at 
pre-test only and included as a covariate in a set of repeated measures ANCOVA tests used 
to assess whether there were differences in learning gains for the different groups. As there 
was a significant effect of this covariate, a correlation test was conducted to explore the 
relationship between their vocabulary scores and grammar gain scores. To gain further 
insights, stimulated recall interviews were conducted with four students (high and low 
proficiency) from each group to explore their attitudes and learning strategies. 
All three interventions yielded large, durable gains across the four tests while the 
control group made no improvement. No significant differences emerged between the PI, 
MOI, and PI+MOI groups overall. However, effect sizes suggested that the PI + MOI and 
MOI groups showed trends of larger gains than the PI group in sentence-level receptive (S-R) and productive (S-P) tests. In discourse-level receptive (D-R) and productive (D-P) tests, 
the PI + MOI and PI groups tended to achieve larger gains in the D-R test, while the PI + 
MOI and MOI groups showed trends of larger gains in the D-P test. Notably, the PI + MOI 
group demonstrated the largest gains in three out of four tests, indicating a potential benefits 
of combining the input-based PI with output-based MOI although these findings should be 
interpreted with caution in light of the non-significant statistical differences. Correlation 
results revealed a negative correlation between learners’ vocabulary scores and the S-R gain 
scores in the PI + MOI group, suggesting that PI + MOI was particularly effective for 
supporting learners with low vocabulary proficiency. Finally, the qualitative data showed 
that learners in the PI + MOI and MOI groups believed that the intervention helped them 
both recognize the target feature and produce it in output activities. However, learners in the
PI group only reported that it was helpful for them to notice the target feature in the input 
activities. Additionally, the data suggested that the feedback in PI + MOI and MOI might be 
more effective in focusing learners’ attention than input-based PI. Furthermore, learners, 
especially those with low proficiency, reported relying on the easily identifiable cue (e.g., 
the “by + noun” in the present study) to identify a grammatical feature rather than noticing
the entire structure.