چکیده:
This article reports on an empirical investigation of the teachers’ correction
of students’ spoken errors of linguistic forms in EFL classes, aiming at
exploring the existing controversy in the literature regarding the ambiguity of
recasts - a form of corrective feedback. More specifically, the focus of this
study is to investigate why recasts might be taken simply as confirmation of
meaning and non-corrective repetition rather than as a corrective reformulation.
The database is drawn from transcripts of audio-recordings of 25 lessons from
five teachers (five lessons from each teacher) totaling 31 hours and including
752 error correction exchanges. Analysis of the data suggested that ignoring the
structural differences between various types of recasts and taking them as one
single corrective feedback type might have given rise to two different views of
recasts as to the extent to which recasts might be taken as feedback on form.
Hence, recasts were divided into two distinct types of marked and unmarked ones.
Uptake was taken as the criterion for measuring the effectiveness of recasts and
the extent to which learners might ‘notice’ different types of recasts, though
only at an observable verbal level. Findings indicate that the rate of uptake
move following marked recasts is considerably higher than that of unmarked ones.
The article concludes by arguing that marked recasts are less likely to be taken
as confirmation of meaning rather than feedback on form. However, this
possibility is much higher in unmarked recasts in which there is no added focus
on the corrective reformulation to help the students recognise it as feedback on
form.
خلاصه ماشینی:
However, this possibility is much higher in unmarked recasts in which corrective reformulation is not highlighted by any additional attention-getting element and there is no added focus on the reformulation to help the students recognise it as feedback on form.
To explore whether students actually notice recasts as feedback on form when they uptake the teachers’ corrective reformulations is an interesting topic for further research.
The third type of uptake move is repair, defined as the student’s production of the targeted feature in response to the teacher’s feedback when the teacher does not already provide the correct form.
Uptake might have some form of self-correction by the students in response to the teacher’s attempt to deal with their non-target-like utterances (as in negotiated feedback), or might be the students’ repetition or acknowledgement of the corrected form (as in recasts and explicit correction).
Uptake might have some form of self-correction by the students in response to the teacher’s attempt to deal with their non-target-like utterances (as in negotiated feedback), or might be the students’ repetition or acknowledgement of the corrected form (as in recasts and explicit correction).
· Negotiated feedback: Negotiated feedback is a type of error correction in which the teacher provides the students with signals to facilitate peer- and self-correction, rather than immediately correcting the non-target-like form(s) in their utterances.
In contrast, recasts have sometimes been defined as corrective reformulations of students’ non-target-like forms, accompanied by some attention-getting elements to give the reformulation an added focus (see Chaudron, 1977,1988; Doughty and Varela, 1998; Nicholas et al.