Structured Input Part 1: An Introduction to the Principles of Input Processing

Over the past couple of years, especially since this past summer, I've been getting more and more interested in Structured Input and Processing Instruction. The importance of it really hit me this past summer at the CI Summit in Savannah at one of Eric Herman's presentations about how students can comprehend language without processing it. That is, they can understand input that we give them, but can get confused because of word order, not pay attention to (in conjugated language) verb endings, gender/number agreement, etc, and they can produce language, but it might not always be grammatical.

The resources that have pushed me into incorporating more of this into my classroom are: Common Ground, Structured Input (Which I believe is out of print, but I got a good deal on a used copy), and Eric Herman's presentations and Acquisition Classroom Memo.

Structured Input comes from Bill VanPatten's Input Processing Model. In this post I want to summarize my understanding of Input Processing and the two principles that can inform teachers on how to help their students process meaning AND form. In a later posts I'll write about how and why I think structured input (SI) fits into a CCLT classroom, how it could help teachers who want to use Comprehension-Based teaching but are tied to a textbook, and of course share some examples that you can use in your classroom.

In input processing, BVP shows how and when intake occurs. Intake is the part of input that is processed, it is when a form-meaning connection is made, when a learner makes note of form AND assigns a purpose to it. Intake is when a form becomes part of the learners' linguistic system, though it may not be fully integrated until a learner has had multiple opportunities to encounter AND process the form. That said, it's also possible for a learner to notice something in input and not process it.

There are two principles (and sub-principles) that teachers should consider if they want to move their learners from comprehending to comprehending AND processing.

Primacy of Meaning Principle- Learners process input for meaning before they process it for form.

I would venture to say this is a given for folks in the CCLT world. More than likely, not a whole lot of people would need to change what they're doing in their classrooms in order to put this principle into action. The sub-principles are what might give folks ideas or a checklist of sorts to see if they have structured their input to maximized the possibility that learners process form as well as meaning.

Sub-Principle 1: The Primacy of Content Words Principle
Languages have a lot of grammatical filler words. These words can help clarify meaning, but don't (often) change the meaning of a sentence when glossed over. The challenge then is: how do we enhance those grammatical words without turning to explicit grammar practice and keep focus on meaning?

Sub-Principle 2: The Lexical Preference Principle
If learners can get grammatical information from the vocabulary, they don't need to pay attention to form. Imagine, for example, you are comparing what a student did last weekend with what they are going to do next weekend. If we lead each sentence with the phrases last weekend or next weekend we take away any reason a learner has to pay attention to form because we give away all the grammatical information with the first part of our statement.

Sub-Principle 3: The Preference for Nonredundancy Principle
I'm not 100% clear on this one, but from what I gather the Preference for Nonredundancy Principle says that if there are multiple features in a sentence, students will process a form that is non redundant. A redundant form would be something like the example above "Last weekend we wanted to go to the movies". Students don't have to process past tense because of the past tense clue "Last weekend", a nonredundant form would be "to go". There's nothing that gives away the meaning of 'to go' so it's easier for learners to process.

Sub-Principle 4: The Meaning Before Nonmeaning Principle
The example given in the Structured Input (Farley, 2004) book is about how noun-adjective agreement, Farley talks about the feminine marker -a, doesn't carry meaning so students don't pay attention to them, but the root of the word is meaningful. This could explain why students get grammatical gender so late because oftentimes it doesn't carry meaning.

Sub-Principle 5: The Availability of Resources Principle
In the CCLT community there is a phrase: Shelter vocabulary, not grammar. This falls right into the availability of resources principle. If learners have TOO much content (vocabulary) to sift through they'll have a hard time processing language form.

Sub-Principle 6: The Sentence Location Principle
Farley gives a nice little chart to help show how the location of a sentence can determine the difficulty of processing with the sentence John hates movies.

Most Difficult	Utterance-medial items (middle of sentence)	hate-s
Difficult	Utterance-Final items	movie-s
Least Difficult	Utterance-initial	John

This chart shows that the first word in a sentences is the most likely part to be processed, and although hates and movies both have -s, the plural marker -s on movies is more likely to be processed, and the third person singular marker -s on hates is the least likely feature to be processed.

Principle 2: The First Noun Principle

According to the first noun principle (VanPatten), learners will assume the first noun in an utterance is the subject. This is apparently true not only in Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) languages, but also Object-Verb-Subject (OVS) languages, and is not the result of L1 interference. The example and perceived misconception from the book is that the sentence John is adored by his father can be interpreted as John adores his father even though his father is the one doing the adoring and John is the recipient of the action.

Sub-Principle 1: The Lexical Semantics Principle
If we swap out John for an inanimate object, say 'golf' (to continue quoting the book), learners are more likely to interpret the correct word order because in the sentence Golf is adored by his father is less likely to be interpreted as Golf adores his father.

Sub-Principle 2: The Event Probability Principle
Just as Golf adores his father is not going to be the interpretation of Golf is adored by his father, because it's kind of silly {an inanimate object can't adore something/someone), we also see that an unlikely, animate 'adorer' would also prompt a learner to interpret an utterance more appropriately. The parrot was adored by John's father isn't very likely to be interpreted as the parrot adores John's father because it wouldn't be very logical (but more possible than golf).

Sub-Principle 3: The Contextual Constraint Principle
The first noun principle can be overridden not only by lexical-semantic choices or probability, but also if learners have context going into a sentence. When students have context (perhaps a story) that would give them information about what is more likely for a sentence to say they can more easily process an OVS sentence.

With these two principles in mind, I think that we can start to think about the language we give students, at least in written form

Next time I'll share what I learned about Structured Input and how to create activities! Until then!