Relative Effects Of Explicit Recasts And Implicit Recasts On Chinese Middle School Students’ Grammar Acquisition

Recast, as one of the corrective feedback forms, has been found to be most frequently employed by teachers to deal with learner errors in interactions in second language classrooms both abroad and at home. It is suggested that if handled properly, recast can maximize in its effectiveness in promoting students’accuracy of L2use. Therefore, the present study tries to examine the effects of different types of recasts (explicit recasts and implicit recasts) on Chinese junior middle school students’ grammar acquisition (the third-person singular in English simple present tense) in classroom teaching context.The current study lasts about5weeks. It adopts a pretest-posttest design for the experiment.150students participating in the study are from three classes of Grade two in the same junior middle school in Shanxi Province, China, but only90students (30from each class) are initially selected as the actual subjects according to their latest achievement test. Then the three classes are randomly assigned to three groups:explicit recast group, implicit recast group and control group. During the classroom teaching activities, three classes are all taught by the researcher with the same teaching materials and length of class time, etc., except for the types of feedback provided by the teacher. The explicit recast group receives the feedback in form of explicit recasts, the implicit recast group receives the feedback in form of implicit recasts, and the control group does not receive any forms of feedback.The data of the present study is analyzed with the help of SPSS13.0software. The methods of data analysis mainly include descriptive statistics, paired-samples t tests and one-way ANOVA analyses. The research results are as follows:In the pretest, the testing results reveal that the subjects’the mastery the target structure of the three classes is not satisfying, and there are no between-group differences. But after the treatment sessions, the results of posttest indicate that all the subjects make significant improvement for the target structure use. Then Scheffe post hoc analyses shows that among the three groups, the subjects in explicit recast group significantly perform better than those in the implicit recast group and the control group, but there are no significant differences between the subjects in implicit recast group and those in the control group.Based on the above research findings, theoretically, the present study:1) provides empirical evidence for the claim that recast can be explicit in nature, and empirically reinforces that explicit recasts are more beneficial for learners in L2development;2) provides empirical support for the Interaction Hypothesis which claims the beneficial role of interaction in SLA;3) positively supports the role of attention in corrective feedback, provides empirical evidence for the Noticing Hypothesis which claims the beneficial role of attention in SLA, and at the same time it implies the beneficial role of negative evidence in SLA. Pedagogically, the findings implies that in the communication-oriented and grammar-oriented classroom context, in order to promote students’accuracy of English language use, the explicit recasts are the better choice for teachers to deal with students’errors compared with the implicit recasts.