Noticing Of Lexical And Morphological Changes In Recasts

The present study aims to investigate (1) the extent to which Chinese ESL (English as second language) learners notice recasts;(2) whether different error types in recasts affect Chinese ESL learners’noticing or not; and (3) the extent to which Chinese ESL learners repair the noticed recasts.The present study is longitudinal in nature. Four middle school students participated in20lessons, totaling1200minutes over a period of5weeks. During the class, participants were asked to finish some sentence-translation and picture-description tasks firstly and then recasts were provided when there was any error in their utterances. After recasts, stimulated recall was used to discriminate between learner’s imitation of the researcher’s utterance and a restructuring of their incorrect utterance. All the classes were audio-recorded and then the recordings were transcribed to collect useful data.The results of the present study are:(1) the subjects in the present study noticed most of lexical and morphological changes in recast. To be more exact, the rate of noticing in the present study was65%;(2) the different error types in recasts did affect learners’noticing of recasts. As found in the present study,77%of lexical recasts could be noticed, while only56%of morphological recasts could be noticed;(3) the subjects in the present study could repair the noticed recasts to a higher extent, which was also affected by different error types. To be more exact,64%of noticed lexical recasts and 46%of noticed morphological recasts could be repaired. In addition, the noticing of recasts was related to the complexity of recasts. The four subjects were able to notice most of the simple recasts, no matter what error types they were, and to incorporate the noticed recasts into their own utterances accurately. As for the complex recasts, they could not incorporate appropriately especially when the recast included two or more changes even though they had noticed the changes, because they grasped only a partial picture of the input offered by the researcher.The present study is expected to provide pedagogical implications for Chinese ESL classrooms both theoretically and practically. Theoretically, this study helps to demonstrate the process of second language acquisition and the cognitive processing and practically to improve the teaching methods adopted in Chinese ESL classroom which are necessary to improve Chinese ESL learners’proficiency in English.