Effects Of Recasts On Correcting English Grammatical Errors

A recast as a type of implicit corrective feedback, is a reformulation of students' expression, which is based on students' original expression and includes correction of some errors while retains the central meaning of the utterance. Researches on recasts are rather ample abroad, while they are so few in China. On the basis of referring to researches abroad, we found that recasts have some shortcomings which can not be resolved by themselves. That is, information included in recasts is rather ambiguous, intention of correcting is not easy to be perceived. Those cause very low rate of correction from students. Therefore in the research we tried to reform recasts. That is to say, we combined recasts with other type of feedback. In one word, the research was designed according to the situation of English teaching in China, and tried to explore effects of recasts on correcting English grammatical errors which were produced by Chinese junior students.The study was carried out with an experiment which adopted a 3x2 random factorial design with 43 subjects of junior middle school students. 21 medium students and 22 excellent students were selected.The results were as follows:(1) Subjects of all experimental groups outperformed subjects of a control group in posttest.(2) Main effects of feedback type were significant. Two combinations of recasts were more effective than recasts group, while there was no significant difference between two combinations.(3) Feedback type interacted with student type. Two combinations of recasts were more effective than recasts to medium students, while recasts, combinations of recasts and metalinguistic clues were more effective than combinations of recasts and explicit correction to excellent students.The research also discussed the mechanism how recasts to function. From the view of linguistics, we analyzed some features of recasts. For example, recasts are interactive, recasts can attract attention of students, and also provide information about target language. So we drew a conclusion that recasts make students notice errors in their output, then they will modify their output according to the correction in the recasts, gradually they will form more accurate hypothesis of the grammar. From the view of educational psychology, we applied the zone of proximal development to analyze the mechanism. It seems that we created the suitable zone of proximal development between the current level of students' and the higher level .With the help of a teacher's recasts, students' language level will be improved gradually, until they attain the higher level, which is symbolized with formation of language system and ability in controlling output.The thesis also gave some suggestions about feedback in English teaching. That is, feedback should be timely and appropriate, and should include correct information. Teachers should pay attention to students' response to feedback.