The impetus for this research was the exchange between Wong/VanPatten and a group of Russianists published in Foreign Language Annals in 2003 and 2004. In "The Evidence is IN: Drills are OUT," Wong and VanPatten (2003) asked, "Are mechanical drills necessary for language acquisition?" Citing over a dozen studies conducted over the past 15 years, the two researchers found that there is no evidence from either a theoretical or an empirical stand point that mechanical drills are necessary for language acquisition, regardless of the language being studied. In place of mechanical drills, Wong and Van Patten posit that focus-on-form instruction, and particularly one of its subsets, Processing Instruction (hereafter PI), can successfully replace mechanical drills in teaching L2 grammar.

In their response, Leaver, Rifkin, Shekhtman, et al. raised many objections about the applicability of Wong and VanPatten's conclusions to the teaching of Russian. In Wong and VanPatten's (2004) follow-up to the response, the researchers challenged teachers of Russian to present empirical evidence that mechanical drills (i.e., traditional instruction, hereafter TI) are necessary for language acquisition or that PI or other focus-on-form approaches would not work for Russian.

That challenge has led the authors to compare the effects of two approaches to teaching Russian's directional-locational (Kyda/zde) distinction: one using TI with mechanical drills, the other using PI. In this article we report the out comes of that preliminary study, and take up a related and no less significant challenge: namely, developing models of PI and Structured Input (a component of PI, hereafter SI) materials for teaching specific issues in Russian grammar. Although Rubinstein (424-25) offered a preliminar description of  PI activities for Russian over a decade ago, there is yet to be a corpus of PI or SI activities for Russian. Drawing on the pedagogical principles and models articulated in Lee and VanPatten, Farley, and Wong (2005), we will first describe such activities and then use one set of them in an empirical study.