A Comparative Study On The Effects Of Recasts And Prompts On Students’ Oral English Output In Junior High School

In recent years, recasts and prompts, as the most frequently used correctivefeedback (CF), have received much attention in the domestic and foreign studies. It isa hot topic to research which kind of feedback is more effective to reduce students’mistakes and improve their English competence. Specifically, facing the man-machinetalk in2016Shenyang senior high school entrance exams, the English teachers injunior high schools eagerly hope to find out the effective feedback to developstudents’ oral English output. However, to the author’s knowledge, there exist fewstudies relating to this topic thoroughly.Therefore, this thesis, drawing on the Interaction Hypothesis and OutputHypothesis, aims to make a comparative study on the effects of recasts and promptson students’ oral English output in junior high school. The experiment employed tests,observation and questionnaire. The subjects, divided into recast group and promptgroup, received respective feedback in the8-week intervention. The results reveal thatboth prompts and recasts work on students’ oral English output whereas prompts havea tendency to trump recasts in improving their global skills. Notably, prompts aresuperior to recasts in the domains of grammar, vocabulary and pragmatics. Thisphenomenon can be attributed to the fact that output-oriented prompts lead tostudents’ self-repair and prompts place increased demands on students and push themto modify their output. Arguably, a tendency for recasts to excel prompts by makingsignificant improvement in pronunciation is understandable because recasts are noticeable and salient in phonological instruction. Apart from that, in observation, it isindicated that prompts lead to either self-repair or peer repair while recasts generaterepetition or acknowledgement. Next, the questionnaire implies that most learners liketo be given prompts and encouraged to correct errors by themselves. Finally, thisarticle closes with the major findings, pedagogical implications, limitations andsuggestions for the further study.