The Effects of Recasts on the Accuracy and the Quality of L2 Learners Language Performance

Abstract

This study investigated whether or not L2 learners perceive recasts as corrective feedback rather than pragmatic discourse moves, recasts indeed contribute to improving the accuracy of learners' language performance, and finally recasts have influence on the quality of learners' output. The participants of this study were 40 Korean EFL middle school students and they were assigned to the either the recast group or the control group. The study was conducted over the 5-week experimental period using picture description tasks. The participants were also asked to provide their feelings or opinions towards the engaged tasks and the teacher recasts. The overall results revealed that the teacher recasts did not lead to improved accuracy of the learners' performance partly because the participants in the current study tended to take the teacher recasts as pragmatic discourse moves rather than corrective feedback. This study also discovered that the students in the control group produced more words and showed higher level of syntactic complexity than those in the recast group, suggesting that frequent teacher recasts might lead students not to take risk in their language performance.