Recasts, Working Memory And Chinese Junior High School EFL Learners’ English Question Development

Long’s (1981,1983) Interaction Hypothesis (IH) claims that conversational interaction is a driving force forL2acquisition and conversational interaction facilitates language acquisition by providing learners with bothpositive and negative evidence. Partly inspired by results in first language acquisition, much second languageresearch has focused on the role of implicit negative feedback, and in particular, on the efficacy of so-calledcorrective recasts. One primary area of current interest is examining the links among recasts, learner-internal and–external factors, and linguistic development, it is also the current focus of research to explore learners’ internalpsychological mechanism by which recasts promotes language development.It is quite likely for different social contexts to lead to different results of language acquisition. A number ofprevious interactional studies have been set in SLA immigrant context. This study, based on the theory ofInteraction Hypothesis (Long,1981,1983,1996) and Wen Zhisheng’s (2012) Integrated Framework of WorkingMemory for SLA, aims at investigating the mediating influence of working memory on recasts in Chinese youngEFL learners’ English question development. The author attempts to find the answer for the following twoquestions:(1) Does task-based interaction with recasts have any impact upon the Chinese junior high school EFLlearners’ English question development? If so, what impact does it have?(2) Does working memory span haveany impact upon the Chinese junior high school EFL learners’ uptake of the recasts? If so, what impact does ithave?The participants were30Chinese junior high school students who were randomly selected from an intactclass and randomly assigned to a recast group and a nonrecast group. A pretest-posttest-delayed posttest designwas employed to detect any improvement of learners’ English question development. The participants’ Englishquestion development was assessed through developmental stage increase of English question forms and theexplicit and implicit knowledge measurement. A Chinese listening span test was conducted to measure learners’working memory span in this study.The results of the study are as follows: Task-based interaction with recasts has no impacts upon Chinesejunior high school EFL learners’ English question development and working memory has no impacts uponChinese junior high school EFL learners’ uptake of recasts.