The Relative Efficacy Of Recasts And Prompts On The Learning Of English Articles By Chinese Efl Learners In Relation To Learners' Proficiency

Classroom interaction has been the center of interest in the field of second language acquisition since the end of 1970s. Corrective feedback especially recasts and prompts, as the very important part in the classroom interaction, has aroused many researchers'attention. However, due to various factors, the results of both the theoretical and empirical studies on the relative efficacy of recasts and prompts are in inconsistence. In recent years, researchers have started to investigate how learner-internal factors (like learner's proficiency level, memory capacity, etc.) mediate the effectiveness of corrective feedback. With more studies have been done on the learner-internal mediating factors of corrective feedback, there are still gaps in this research scope.Based on Schmidt (1990)'s Noticing Hypothesis and Long (1996)'s Interaction Hypothesis, this study investigated the relative efficacy of recasts and prompts on the learning of two of the functions of English articles (i.e., the use of"a"as first mention and the use of"the"as anaphoric reference) by Chinese EFL learners and explored the effect of one possible moderating factor—learners'language proficiency. Two research questions were addressed in the study:1. Do recasts and prompts have differential effects on the learning of two of the functions of English articles (i.e., the use of"a"as first mention and the use of"the"as anaphoric reference) by Chinese EFL learners? If yes,2. Are the differential effects of recasts and prompts on the learning of two of the functions of English articles by Chinese EFL learners moderated by learners'language proficiency?The present study employed a pretest and posttests design. Three intact classes, including 72 Grade 10 high-school students from a high school of Hubei Province, involved in the study. The three intact classes were assigned to three conditions randomly: a recast group, a prompt group and a control group. Each group was further divided into a high-proficiency subgroup and a low–proficiency subgroup according to the student's English score in the high school entrance exam. The experiment of this study took over 4 weeks. In the first week, the pretest was conducted on the three groups respectively, including a writing test and an error correction test. In the second week, the three participating groups received two task-based treatment sessions. During the treatment sessions, the recast group did the two narrative tasks and received recasts; the prompt group did the two narrative tasks and received prompts; and the control group did the two narrative tasks but did not receive any corrective feedback. Then, the immediate posttest was conducted immediately after the treatment. In the fourth week, the delayed posttest was conducted on the three groups.On the basis of data analyses, two major findings were presented as follows: (1) overall prompts were more effective than recasts on the learning of two of the functions of English articles (i.e., the use of"a"as first mention and the use of"the"as anaphoric reference) by Chinese EFL learners. Specifically, both on the writing test and the error correction test, the prompt group didn't significantly outperform the recast group on the immediate posttest; however, the prompt group significantly outperformed the recast group on the delayed posttest. (2) The differential effects of prompts and recasts were related to the learners'language proficiency. Specifically, prompts and recasts were equally effective for the high-proficiency participants both on the writing posttests and error correction posttests; however, prompts were significantly more effective than recasts for the low-proficiency learners both on the writing posttests and error correction posttests.The findings of this study were in line with that of Ammar and Spada (2006). This study provided certain support for the Noticing Hypothesis and Interaction Hypothesis. The first finding of the study suggested that participants in the recast group may not perceive recasts (implicit feedback), whereas participants in the prompt group were more possible to notice prompts (operated as explicit feedback in the study). As proposed by the Noticing Hypothesis, learner who notices more learns more, so prompts were more effective than recasts in the learning of target structure. Moreover, the second finding confirmed the Interaction Hypothesis that acquisition was mediated by the learner's proficiency. Therefore, learners'proficiency level should be taken into consideration when providing corrective feedback during the classroom interaction.