ON EFFECTIVENESS OF WRITTEN RECAST VS. EXPLICIT NEGATIVE FEEDBACK

Feedback research is a mature field of inquiry that offers excellent literature reviews of specific stages of the feedback process. However, the type and amount of feedback students should receive still remain an interesting research question because of the pedagogical implications of the issue on FL learning and teaching (Lightbow & Spada,1999).
Among various types of feedback, recast seems to be the most effective implicit negative feedback (Ayoun, 2001). Recast “involves the reformulation of all parts of student’s utterance, minus the error” (Lyster & Ranta 1997, p. 46). Long, Inagaki & Ortega (1998) refer to it as corrective recast and define it as responses which, although communicatively oriented and focused on meaning rather than form, incidentally reformulates all or part of the learner’s utterance, providing information that was missing or ill-produced.
The aim of this study was to explore the effectiveness of written recasts in an EFL classroom. Forty female Iranian EFL learners and a female teacher participated in the study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions (recast vs. explicit negative feedback).The learners in treatment group received recast while learners in the control group received the same instruction as the experimental group but explicit negative feedback. It was intended to investigate whether recast affects the linguistic accuracy of Iranian EFL learners’ writing ability at the pre-intermediate level of language proficiency with another group receiving explicit negative feedback in order to master the right use of the auxiliary verb “do/did” and the irregular vs. regular form of verbs in the simple past tense.
The data were submitted to an Analysis of Variance (ANOVA), using the General Lineal Model. According to the results, students in the recast condition did better than the control group, even though they have been outperformed by controls in the pre-test. On the other hand, control group did not show differences between the pre-test and the post-test. The results indicate that students perform better when they receive recast as negative feedback. In other words, recast has an effect on students’ performance. However, that difference tends to be higher for more proficient students.