A Case Study Of Recast's Effect On The Accuracy Of Students' Oral Expression

There were many researchers who have studied the effect of corrective feedback on the second language acquisition since the 1990 s. Recast is one of the most important corrective feedback. It is an implicit reformulation of all or part of students' expression(Lyster, 1998a). Thus, the meaning of the former expression is kept while the errors are corrected implicitly after recast.Although there were so much research about recast both at home and abroad, the experimental studies were so few that the effect of recast has not been generally acknowledged. Moreover, the influential factors have not been investigated further. Besides, in the traditional Chinese EFL settings, students' oral ability is not particularly valued and there is no great emphasis on improving their accuracy of oral expression by using corrective feedback,which cannot make their comprehensive ability be cultivated. Thus, this study aims to investigate the effect of recast on improving the accuracy of students' oral expression in Chinese EFL settings. This study answers the following two research questions in detail: firstly, do the learners improve their accuracy on the target language forms when the teacher uses recast as the corrective feedback in the oral activities? Secondly, what are the main factors that influence the effect of recast?To solve these questions, this thesis has conducted a case study among four grade-two students in senior high school. Firstly, to get to know students' English level, a pretest of target language forms were carried out to them.Later, each student was asked to do three kinds of oral-activity tests including the jigsaw, spotting-the-difference and the topic-based speech for 6 times during the one-month study. Each activity had the target language forms which was tested particularly. In the process of each oral activity, recast was the main corrective feedback to correct students' errors on target language forms. The numbers of errors were calculated to the graphs which indicated that if students' accuracy had been improved on the target language forms after receiving recast from the teacher. Then, the effect of recast on learners' language accuracy could be confirmed. Furthermore, after the whole oral study, the comparison of learners' English performance between pretest and post-test can show the effect of recast directly. Besides, learners' uptake of recast was an important factor to measure the effect of recast. Finally, the author conducted an interview to the four learners. Their response was analyzed carefully to discover the main factors that influenced recast's effect.From the above research, this thesis proved the effect of recast on improving the accuracy of students' oral expression in Chinese EFL settings.In specific ways, the students' accuracy of the target language forms was improved on the whole after the teacher used recast as the main corrective feedback. However, different learners had different language level and theireffect of recast was also different. For the high achiever, their accuracy on target language forms was improved, but the extent of improvement was limited than the medium achievers. However, the low achiever's accuracy was influenced by recast to some degree, but they did not get obvious improvement. What is more, the main factors that influenced the effect of recast were learners' personality, motivation, previous knowledge reserves,the good habits of learning, noticing and the learning environment.