Chinese EFL learners' noticing of recasts: Its relation to target structures, uptake, and working memory capacity

Recasts are one type of corrective feedback that reformulates all or part of a learner's erroneous utterance during communicative interaction without changing the meaning. Categorized as implicit and input-providing corrective feedback, recasts have become the focus of debate in the area of interaction research in recent years. The debate primarily centers on (1) whether recasts facilitate learner noticing of the gap between the interlanguage and the target language, which is essential for learning to take place; and (2) whether uptake in response to recasts is a sign of learner noticing of recasts.;The current study aimed to shed some light on the debate about recasts by investigating (1) Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners' noticing of recasts, (2) the relationship between learners' noticing of recasts and the types of structures targeted by recasts; (3) the relationship between learners' noticing of recasts and their production of modified output; and (4) the relationship between learners' noticing of recasts and their individual differences in working memory capacity. Sixty second-year college EFL learners from a university in China participated in this study. Each participant engaged in one session of audio- and video-recorded communicative interaction with the researcher. Immediately after the interaction, they participated in a stimulated recall interview in which they watched the video of their interactional tasks and reported their perception of the recasts they received during interaction. The learners also did a L1-Chinese reading span test as a measure of their working memory capacity.;Results indicated that learners could perceive the corrective nature (i.e., noticing the corrective function and noticing the gap) of most recasts. In terms of target structures, learners were more likely to notice the gap of lexical and phonological recasts than noticing the gap of morphosyntactic recasts, suggesting that lexical and phonological recasts were more salient and noticeable than morphosyntactic recasts. In addition, learners were found to produce more modified output when they noticed the gap involved in recasts, suggesting a possible link between noticing of recasts and production of modified output. Finally, this study found that learners' working memory capacity did not predict their noticing of the corrective nature of recasts. This indicates that working memory is not the only cognitive factor that affect learner noticing of recasts, and that the effect of working memory on learners' noticing of recasts may be mitigated by factors such as learners' prior knowledge.