Summary

These materials set out the principles behind processing instruction. Processing instruction materials are reading and listening activities. The aim is to design tasks such that learners have to show that they have attended to the meaning of specific target features when they are reading or hearing sentences in the target language. These target features are those which a) appear to be slow to be acquired in production, b) have differences with the learners’ L1 and/ or c) are likely to be ‘ignored’ by learners when they normally hear or read the languages because the features are communicatively redundant (i.e. there are other clues in the input which communicate the same meaning, e.g. intonation, syntax, lexical items).