A Study Of Teacher Recast In Chinese EFL Classrooms

The effect and contribution of corrective feedback in classrooms have been of great interest in the field of second language acquisition and pedagogy. It has been proved that students are provided with opportunities to attend to language form (Long, 1996), to notice a gap between their own interlanguage form and the target language input, and then to invite more uptake (Swain, 1985) to assist interlanguage development. Recast as a type of corrective feedback, is an implicit reformulation of all or part of student's expression (Lyster,1998). It includes some correction based on the students original expression while retains the central meaning of the utterance. There are ample researches on recasts aboard, while they are so few in China. On the basis of research findings abroad, the limitations of recasts have been found to be its ambiguity in delivering information, and intention of correcting on the part of the speaker being unperceived. As a result, recasts are found to arouse very low students uptake except for those followed by additional cues. The present study, following up the research by Lyster and Ranta (1997), and Lyster (1998), attempts to discuss whether additional cues are applied by teachers while using recasts, and the potential effects of additional cues in recasts on EFL students' language development in the form of uptake.Three research questions are addressed:1) How frequently do English teachers use recasts with and without additional cues in classroom teaching?2) What are the kinds of additional cues used in these Chinese EFL classrooms?3) Are particular additional cues of recasts associated with successful uptake?The data of the study were derived from observations of altogether 10 intensive reading lessons of 5 teachers with each teacher 2 lessons, which amount to 900 minutes of recording. On the basis of data analysis, the major findings are presented as follows:1) The teachers in this study use recasts both with and without additional cues. The use of additional cues with recasts overwhelms those without any additional cues.2) The additional cues the teachers used in this context are stress, reduction, expansion, recasts with praise, recasts with explicit information, translation, repetition of recasts, repetition of errors plus recasts, interruption to stop students, and written support on blackboard.3) In conjunction with the results of other studies reviewed earlier, recasts are found to be accompanied by additional cues such as reduction, stress, repetition of recasts and interruption to stop students which are facilitative for learner uptake in this context.The present study reveals the types of additional cues accompanied recasts as well as the types of additional cues of better uptake rates in a typical Chinese EFL context. The pedagogical implication can be inferred from the findings: Teacher should be aware of different effect of the additional cues which accompany recasts and make the correctiveness of recasts more explicit, so that they can adopt more additional cues to help students notice the differences between their own utterance and the more target-like ways to express. The limitations of this study lies in its lack of follow-up studies to explore the long-term impact of teacher recasts with additional cues on student language development.