A Study On The Effects Of Recasting On Learners At Different English Proficiency Levels

With the further study of Task-based Teaching Approach in English classroom teaching,the researches on corrective feedback have become more and more popular in second language acquisition.Scholars at home and abroad(Lyster&Ranta,1997;Ellis et al,2006;Yang Yingli&Lin Zhengjun,2012)have focused on the effectiveness and the types of corrective feedback.Recasting,a kind of implicit feedback,is considered as one important way of corrective feedback(recasts refer to teachers' restatement of all or part of students' utterance to remove learners' errors but remain the original meaning.).Many foreign scholars(Mackey&Philp,1998;Panova&Lyster,2002;Leeman,2003;Li,2016a)have done a lot of in-depth researches on recast and have achieved great progress.However,the researches on recast started late in China,and most previous domestic researches(Liu Xuehui&Zhuqing,2010;Yang Yingli,2013)mainly focused on comparative studies of the overall effects between recast and other types of corrective feedback,the researches need to be deepened on the effects of recasting on learners at different English proficiency levels in developing their implicit and explicit knowledge.Guided by the three theories of Interaction Theory,Skill Acquisition Theory,and Transfer Appropriate Processing Theory,an empirical study was conducted among 78 non-English-major students(the experimental group:44;the control group:34)of Southwest Petroleum University in the College English Class.According to the scores of CET4,learners in the experimental and the control group were respectively subdivided into the learners at high and low proficiency level(the experimental group:high-level 22,low-level 22;the control group:high-level 17,low-level 17).Based on the target structure-English past passive,the instructor of the present study provided"recasts" for learners in the experimental group after two dictogloss tasks and adopted the measurement of GJT(grammaticality judgment test)and EIT(elicited imitation test)to collect the results of the pre-test,(immediate-posttest),and the post-test of the experimental and the control group,and the present study aims to answer the following research questions:1.Is there any significant difference between the experimental group and the control group on the acquisition of the target structure-English past passive?If so,what are the differences?2.Is there any difference in the effects of recast on the acquisition of the target structure-English past passive between learners at high and low English proficiency level in the experimental group?If so,what are the differences?3.Is there any difference in the effects of recast on the acquisition of the target structure-English past passive between learners at high and low English proficiency level on the development of implicit knowledge and explicit knowledge in the experimental group?If so,what are the differences?The present study adopted the software Statistical Product and Service Solutions version 16.0(SPSS 16.0)to process and analyze the collected data.Descriptive Statistics,Independent Sample Test,One-Way/Two-Way ANOVA,Paired Sample Test were performed to test the results of the pre-test and post-test between the experimental and control group,the results among the pre-test,immediate-posttest,and the post-test in the experimental group.Through the comparison of the results of GJT and EIT in the pre-test and post-test between the experimental group and the control group,and the results of GJT and EIT in the pre-test,immediate-posttest,and the post-test within the experimental group,the findings indicated that recast was effective for the learners at different English proficiency levels on the target structure-English past passive.However,the effects of recast had significant difference between the learners at different proficiency levels.In detail,recast was more effective for learners at high proficiency level in developing their explicit knowledge,while there was no significant difference in effects of recast between learners at high and low proficiency level in implicit knowledge.And it was also found that effect of recast would decrease over time.This study was carried out in English classroom setting,and the instructor provided"recast" for English learners in the focus-on-meaning language activities,which studied the role of recasting in classroom teaching and compared the effects of recast on learners at different English proficiency levels in developing their implicit and explicit knowledge.As a result,this study helps teachers to understand the role of recast in foreign language class,design reasonable classroom teaching tasks and promote the efficiency of foreign language class.