Do Recasts Promote Noticing the Gap in L2 Learning?

| March 21, 2011
Title
Do Recasts Promote Noticing the Gap in L2 Learning?

Keywords: implicit negative feedback, recasts, noticing, stimulated recall, negative evidence

Authors
Hideki Sakai
Shinshu University,Japan

Bio Data
Hideki Sakai is an associate professor in the Faculty of Education at Shinshu University, where he teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in TEFL methodology and second language acquisition. His current research interests include second language interactional studies, classroom second language acquisition, and psycholinguistic aspects of listening and speaking.

Abstract
This paper reports the effects of implicit negative feedback in the form of recasts on noticing. Twenty Japanese-speaking learners of English were assigned to an experimental group (the recast group, n = 10) or a control group (the no-feedback group, n = 10). They engaged in an information gap task, during which the recast group received recasts to their erroneous utterances or non-corrective repetition of their target like utterances, whereas the no-feedback received no corrective feedback. The participants verbal reports about noticing about their errors were elicited through stimulated recall. Both groups noticed errors or problems at the moment of production about 10% of the time. Further, the recast group noticed their errors through recasts 21.6% of the time. Results suggest that recasts alone did help L2 learners notice their errors.
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Category: Main Editions, Volume 13 Issue 1