Oral Corrective Feedback: Recasts versus Prompts

Diana Mazgutova, United Kingdom

Dr Diana Mazgutova has been a language teacher for more than 10 years. She began her job as an English teacher at the Institute for English Language Teacher Education in Uzbekistan, teaching undergraduate university students. Then she continued her job as a teacher of academic English at the International Study Centre at Lancaster University in the UK. Currently, she works as a postdoctoral research fellow at Lancaster University and will soon be starting her job as a lecturer at the University of Leeds. Her main areas of research and teaching interest are academic writing, oral and written corrective feedback, second language acquisition and task-based language teaching and learning.
E-mail: d.mazgutova@lancaster.ac.uk

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Introduction
Types of corrective feedback
Conclusion
References

Introduction

Scholars are preoccupied with investigating a variety of variables that might affect and contribute to the process of second language learning. Recent SLA research has been characterised by a significant growth of interest in corrective feedback and its impact on second language development. A number of studies explored different factors that have to do with oral corrective feedback and recognised it as an important source of interactional benefit (Mackey, 2007). It has been widely claimed that feedback leads to language development by making the troublesome aspects of learner interlanguage more salient and offering the best opportunities to concentrate on language production.

The value of interaction in SLA is no longer doubted; however, to date, there are still some issues in interaction research that scholars have not found definite answers to and must explore further. In other words, it has been established that interaction impacts learning; however, it is still an open question how it creates opportunities for learning and what the particular relationships among different types of interactional feedback and second language learning outcomes are. These are some of the issues that remain widely investigated and hotly debated in second language research.

Types of corrective feedback

Corrective feedback has generated a growing interest among second language researchers. A number of studies (Ammar & Spada, 2006; Bitchener, & Ferris, 2012; Ellis, Loewen, & Erlam, 2006; Evans, Hartshorn, & Strong-Krause, 2011; Farrokhi, 2012; Han, 2002; Lyster, 2004; Lyster & Mori, 2006; Mackey & Philp, 1998; Sheen, 2006; 2010) investigated corrective feedback and provided consistent evidence that it does significantly benefit language acquisition. However, it is important to note that corrective feedback might exhibit different effects on learning depending on which of the two categories, explicit or implicit error correction, it fits in.

According to Ellis et al. (2006), as far as implicit learning is concerned, it is believed to be closely associated with intuitive awareness through automatic processing, while explicit learning is linked with conscious awareness through controlled processing. Thus, explicit feedback differs from implicit feedback in that the latter does not presume an overt indication of an error. Explicit feedback is usually represented as either explicit error correction or metalinguistic feedback. Alternatively, implicit feedback can be represented as either recasts or prompts.

1. Implicit corrective feedback: Recasts
Much research has been devoted to studying recasts as a distinguished type of implicit error correction in second language context. Work on recasts has generated more than 40 descriptive and empirical studies conducted in laboratory and classroom contexts (Long, 2007). It appears that recasts are the most frequently utilised corrective strategy in elementary, high school as well as university classroom settings. When it comes to the definition, recasts constitute the reformulation of a learner’s non-target like utterance by altering one or more of its incorrect forms while retaining its original meaning.
Some teacher's recasts can be of one word, a grammatical or lexical modification or translations in response to a student's use of the target language. When recast is used, the teacher does not use phrases like “You mean...” or “You should say...” (Lyster & Randa, 1997).
Example of recast:
Student: Were you surprisING by anything in the article? (grammatical error)
Teacher: Were you surprisED by anything in the article? ( feedback- recast)

SLA researchers distinguish various types of recasts. According to Sheen (2006), this type of error correction might fall into one of the four categories such as 1) partial, 2) isolated/incorporated, 3) corrective and 4) intensive. Alternatively, Lyster (2004) classified recasts into four distinct subcategories such as 1) isolated declarative (the corrected reformulation has no additional meaning), 2) incorporated declarative (the corrected reformulation contains additional meaning), 3) isolated interrogative, and 4) incorporated interrogative.

A considerable number of developmental benefits of recasts have been consistently highlighted. One of the advantages of this feedback type was emphasised by Long (2007) who argued that “recasts convey needed information about the target language in context” (p. 78). Recasts contain reformulations of the utterances produced by learners themselves. Therefore, learners as recipients of recasts do not need to be preoccupied with struggling to determine the meaning that recasts originally contain and, instead, concentrate more on form and form-function mapping. Another advantage of recasts is the fact that the faulty form produced by the learner and the correct form are juxtaposed and, thus, the salience of the correct target form is enhanced and learner’s noticing promoted. In this way, learners might benefit from getting the best opportunities to make relevant comparisons between the two forms and, thus, notice the gap in their interlanguage (Ellis et al., 2006).

Besides the numerous advantages of recasts, some problems associated with this feedback type have been addressed and discussed in the literature. One of the observed weaknesses of this oral corrective technique is the potential ambiguity of its function. Learners do not always perceive the interlocutor’s utterance as corrective. Indeed, students are quite likely to misinterpret the intended corrective move directed at them as a confirmation or disconfirmation of meaning rather than form. It is often argued that immediate uptake on the part of a learner does not provide sufficient evidence about learning. Learner’s contiguous reply may simply indicate an unacknowledged parroting of the interlocutor’s target like utterance. It is important to note that even when learners modify their poorly-formulated response as a result of recasts, “the modification may simply be a repetition of the alternative form, involving retrieval from short-term memory than long-term memory” (Lyster, 2004, p.406).

Irrespective of all the existent problems inherent with recasts, it would be unwarranted to argue against them and claim that recasts are ineffective for language development. The results of numerous studies suggest that this error correction technique does have a beneficial impact on SLA.

2. Implicit corrective feedback: Prompts

Another type of oral feedback compared with recasts in terms of its nature and effectiveness for second language improvement can be referred to as prompts. Unlike recasts, which provide learners with a correct reformulation of their non-target like utterance, prompts offer learners some signals that ‘prompt’ them to self-correct. Lyster (2004) examined prompts and pointed out that the following four distinct subcategories of this corrective move should be distinguished.

First, it is important to mention clarification requests that indicate that student’s utterance has either been misunderstood by the interlocutor or formed inappropriately by the learner. For instance, such replies on the part of the interlocutor as “Pardon”, or “I don’t understand” can be considered as clarification requests. Another type of prompting technique is the repetition of student utterance including the erroneous part usually with a rising intonation and emphasis so that the error becomes emphasised and can be easily noticed by the learner. It is also important to mention metalinguistic clues, such as provision of students with comments and questions regarding the appropriateness of their utterance, which constitute the third variety of prompts. Finally, Lyster (2004) introduces the elicitation technique where learners are given direct questions and pauses wherever necessary in order to guide them to complete their incorrect utterance.

All these prompting devices have one common trait– they provide learners with a valuable opportunity to self-repair by generating their own modified response. Explicitness and clarity contribute to the efficiency and superiority of this feedback type over recasts.

Conclusion

Many empirical studies are carried out to evaluate the effectiveness of corrective feedback strategies in the L2 classroom. When a learner makes an error, the teacher is faced with a number of choices. They can do one of the following:

• recast it
• give an elicitation prompt
• repeat the error
• seek clarification
• recast and continue not waiting for the pupil to correct
• ignore the error

A teacher can react to a learner's incorrect utterance by ignoring the error and giving no feedback, by explicitly correcting the error, or by prompting the student in some way that an error has been made and the teacher would like the faulty utterance to be rephrased.

To summarise, corrective feedback in the form of both recasts and prompts does contribute substantially to second language development. Both feedback types play their own role and benefit second language development differently. Research conducted on corrective feedback with L2 learners imply that prompts are more effective than recasts in terms of enabling learners to acquire the form that caused the error; recasts in turn have been shown to be more effective than providing no corrective feedback. We, however, should not posit the question as directly comparing recasts with prompts as there is no sense in “apples versus oranges" comparison. What might be worth doing instead is considering a range of factors, such as learners’ developmental readiness and age, the type of the target linguistic structure, as well as the teaching context, that are supposed to determine the efficiency of a particular corrective feedback type in SLA (Ammar & Spada, 2006).

References

Ammar, A., & Spada, N. (2006). One size fits all? Recasts, prompts, and L2 learning. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 543-574.

Bitchener, J., & Ferris, D. R. (2012). Written corrective feedback in second language and writing. London: Routledge.

Ellis, R., Lowen, S., & Erlam, R. (2006). Implicit and explicit corrective feedback and the acquisition of L2 grammar. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 339-368.

Evans, N. W., Hartshorn, J. K., & Strong-Krause, D. (2011). The efficacy of dynamic written corrective feedback for university-matriculated ESL learners. System, 39, 229-239.

Farrokhi, F. (2012). The effects of direct written corrective feedback on improvement of grammatical accuracy of high-proficient L2 learners. World Journal of Education, 2, 49-57.

Han, Z. (2002). A study of the impact of recasts on tense consistency in L2 output. TESOL Quarterly, 36, 543-572.

Long, M. H. (2007). Recasts: The story so far. In M. H. Long (Ed.) Problems in SLA.

Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

Lyster, R. (2004). Differential effects of prompts and recasts in form-focused instruction Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 26, 399-432.

Lyster, R., & Mori, H. (2006). Interactional feedback and instructional counterbalance. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 28, 269-300.

Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake: Negotiation of form in communicative classrooms. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 19, 37-66.

Mackey, A. (2007). Introduction: the role of conversational interaction in second language acquisition. In A. Mackey (Ed.) Conversational interaction in SLA: A collection of empirical studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Mackey, A., & Philp, J. (1998). Conversational interaction and second language development: Recasts, responses and red herrings? Modern Language Journal, 82, 338-356.

Sheen, Y. (2006). Exploring the relationship between characteristics of recasts and learner uptake. Language Teaching Research, 10, 361-392.

Sheen, Y. (2010). Introduction: The role of oral and written corrective feedback in SLA. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 169-179.

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