A Study Of The Effects Of Recasts And Clarification Requests On Acquiring English Passive Voice By High School Learners

The present study investigates the effects of two different types of correctivefeedback (CF)(recasts and clarification requests) on the acquisition of English passivevoice by high school learners. It also explores whether there is a relationship betweenlearners’ noticing of CF and the acquisition of English passive voice.This thesis addresses the following specific research questions:1. Do recasts and clarification requests have different effects on the acquisition ofEnglish passive voice by high school learners?2. Is there a relationship between learners’ noticing of CF and the acquisition ofEnglish passive voice?The present study uses a pretest—treatment—immediate posttest—delayed posttestdesign. The experiment is conducted over a nine-week period. The present study isconducted in No.20Middle School of Changsha in Hunan Province.60students fromtwo classes,30boys and30girls, are involved in this study. All learners are randomlydivided into three groups, namely a recast group, a clarification request group and acontrol group. Each group is made up of20students,10male and10female across thegroups. Learners’ noticing of recasts and clarification requests is assessed throughstimulated recall.The SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences, version13.0) is used toanalyze the data. In addition, descriptive statistics, one-way ANOVA, paired-samples TTest, Independent-Samples T test are used to measure the effects of the CF.The major findings are as follows:1) The results indicate that both the recast group and the clarification request grouphave got much more gains in the acquisition of the English passive voice than thecontrol group in the two posttests. The findings in the immediate posttest show thatthere is not a significant difference in the short-term effect for recasts overclarification requests. The results in the delayed posttest indicate that there is asignificant difference for clarification requests over recasts. And the recast and thecontrol groups do not differ from each other significantly, though the recast group hashigher scores than the control group. All in all, the results reveal that recasts are ofsignificant short-term effects while clarification requests are of long-term effects.2) The present study shows that clarification requests lead to a higher rate oflearners’ noticing than recasts, though the difference between the two is not statistically significant. The findings reveal that there is a positive relationshipbetween the learners’ noticing of CF and the acquisition of English passive voice. Thatis, the learners who notice the corrective intent of the CF do better than those who donot.The current study provides some pedagogical implications for how to manipulatefocus-on-form instruction in the (English as a Foreign Language) EFL classroom.English teachers should try to provide a variety of appropriate CF for learners inresponse to their grammatical errors during the interaction and should create moreopportunities for learners to notice the gap between their original utterances and thetarget form.