Recasts And Second Language Development: Explicitness, Perception And Repair

Recasts, which used to be considered as an exemplar of implicit negative feedback, have recently been regarded by some researchers as often being explicit. The long-held belief that recasts are implicit in nature is now open to challenge. Mixed findings have been reported in the literature regarding their benefits for language development. Given their multiple discourse functions and the co-existence of non-corrective repetitions, the ineffectiveness of recasts tends to be attributed to their potential imperceptibility or ambiguity. Under the premise that L2 learners' perceptions may affect the utility of recasts, the present study sets out to investigate the potential relationship between their perceptions and language development, specifically, the factors that contribute to noticing recasts as negative evidence.The study employed a pretest-posttest-delayed posttest experimental design, with a treatment session between the pretest and the posttest. Forty-eight college EFL learners were randomly assigned to one of four treatment conditions. The treatment groups differed as to (1) whether they received full recasts or partial recasts, and (2) whether they performed one-way story description tasks or two-way information gap tasks. A contextualized grammaticality judgment test, an oral imitation test and a picture description test were utilized to detect any changes in participants' knowledge of the target structure and ability to use the target structure - the English past tense. A stimulated recall session was administered to tap participants' perceptions of recasts.Results from statistical analyses yielded four major findings. First, recast type, task type and the interaction between them significantly affected subjects' perceptions of recasts. Second, noticing had a significant effect on subjects' language development on the picture description test; there was also an interaction effect involving noticing on their language development on the oral imitation test. However, the effect of noticing was not observed on the GJT. Third, noticing could significantly predict subjects' repair, but repair was not indicative of their subsequent language development. Fourth, task type and recast type significantly affected subjects' repair rate and their performance on the immediate posttest, but not their performance on the delayed posttest. In conclusion, the present study suggests that learners' perceptions of recasts may in part be constrained by characteristics of recasts and task features. While partial recasts appeared explicit, full recasts were much less explicit in the story description tasks and became increasingly implicit in the information gap tasks. Learners' noticing of recasts as negative evidence was found to have an impact on their subsequent oral language development. It was also observed to be indicative of their modified speech. However, noticing-induced learning warrants further empirical research due to the complicated and dynamic process of second language development.