The Effects Of Recasts And Textual Enhancement On High School Students’ English Articles Learning

Recasts have become a hot topic in second language acquisition research in recent years and they are also a form of feedback widely used in the classrooms.Scholars generally believe that recasts are an implicit type of feedback.Learners have difficulty in identifying recasts as corrective feedback.Therefore,the lack of saliency unermined recasts’ effectiveness for L2 learning.Textual Enhancement(TE)as another implicit technique is used for enhancing the saliency of target features in put which in turn attract learners’ attention to the target form and thus enhances the L2 development.Therefore,a few researchers abroad have combined recasts with TE to investigate if enhancing the saliency of language forms through TE would enhance the saliency and effectiveness of recasts.In China,the studies in this field are limited.So the present study investigated the effects of recasts and TE,separately and in tandem,on EFL learners’ accuracy in using English articles.The two research questions are:(1)Is the combination of recasts with TE more effective than the separate use of the two techniques in enhancing high school students’ use of English articles?(2)Does the combination of recasts with TE contribute to more accurate perception of recasts?Based on selective attention,cognitive comparison and Interaction Hypothesis,the present study adopted a pre-test,four treatment sessions,a post-test and a stimulated recall interview design.The participants in the study were 80 middle-level students from Grade 2 of No.1 Middle School in Zhengning,Gansu Province.The students were randomly assigned to three experimental groups(recasts group,TE group,recasts + TE group)and one control group with 20 students in each group.During four treatment sessions,the participants of the three experimental groups received recasts,TE,or the combination of recasts and TE.The control condition received neither TE nor recasts.Two testing instruments were administered in pretest and post-test to examine the development of the target forms as a result of the treatment conditions: an oral picture description(OP)to measure the knowledge of the target forms in an oral task and a written picture description(WP)to measure the development of the target forms in a written task.Stimulated recall interviews were also held with the participants of the recasts and recasts+TE groups following the post-test to examine the learners’ perceptions of the recasts they received during the recasts sessions.SPSS.22.0 was used to analyze the date.The results showed that:(1)recasts alone were beneficial for English articles learning,(2)the combination of recasts with TE was more effective than recasts only in enhancing learners’ use of English articles,and(3)there was no robust evidence that TE alone could promote learners’ English articles learning.Moreover,the results of the stimulated recall interviews also indicated that the learners had more accurate perceptions of recasts when recasts were accompanied by TE.