To improve the productivity by efficiently conducting an operation of conforming separation lines and the moving direction of a chuck table to each other, at the time of separating a wafer held by the chuck table into individual devices by processing the separation lines formed in the wafer.

Besides a linear scale 334 for recognizing the positional information of an alignment means 8 for detecting the separation lines, another linear scale 224 for recognizing the positional information of the chuck table 2 is set up in the moving direction of the chuck table 2. Using the readings of both of the linear scales 334 and 224, the direction of the wafer is corrected so that the separation lines and the moving direction of the chuck table 2 may conform to each other.