Abstract
A key issue in the debate surrounding the effectiveness of recasts as a corrective feedback strategy concerns the extent to which learners (a) notice them, (b) identify them as corrective, and (c) pay attention to the specific forms that have been corrected. This chapter examines the extent to which uptake following a recast can be taken as evidence of noticing. It reports a study that investigated the effects of two types of implicit corrective feedback (recasts and clarification requests) on both uptake with repair and acquisition of a French verb tense (passé composé). The main findings were (a) 84.5% of the recasts were followed by uptake with repair, (b) there was no evidence that repairing errors was related to acquisition, (c) there was only limited evidence that learners who had the opportunity to repair their errors following recasts benefited more than those who just audited the recasts, and (d) those learners who produced uptake with repair following recasts outperformed those learners who produced uptake with repair following clarification requests. Overall, these findings suggest that it is the noticing of the target feature in the input provided by recasts rather than self-correction that is important for learning. It is suggested that in the instructional context investigated (French as a foreign language in high school) the recasts were highly salient to the learners and that the corrections of their passé composé errors were consistently noticed.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Title of host publication | Noticing and Second Language Acquisition |
| Subtitle of host publication | Studies in Honor of Richard Schmidt |
| Editors | Joara M. Bergsleithner, Sylvia Nagem Frota, Jim K. Yoshioka |
| Place of Publication | Honolulu |
| Publisher | National Foreign Language Resource Center, University Of Hawai'i at Manoa |
| Pages | 61-80 |
| Number of pages | 19 |
| ISBN (Print) | 9780983581666 |
| Publication status | Published - 2013 |