Corrective Recasts: Do they work?

Introduction

I don’t know how many of you are aware of the work of Gianfranco Conti. He champions his own approach to teaching foreign languages in schools and has a faithful following, not to mention a massive ego and a dedication to American-style self-promotion. His book The Language Teacher Toolkit, co-written with Steve Smith, sells well, helped by Conti’s energetic promotion of himself and his gruelling tours of the UK and elsewhere, where he promotes his painting-by-numbers approach to foreign language teaching. His blog, The Language Gym, is worth a visit, if only to marvel at his stamina, and the confidence with which he makes his plethora of dubious claims.

A good example of Conti’s claims is this: “As several studies have clearly shown, recasts do not really ‘work’”. (Note that Conti says the studies “clearly” show that recasts don’t “really” work.) ?

Corrective Recasts

Recasts are the focus of this post, though more accurately they're “Corrective Recasts”. They’re important because they form an important plank in the framework of analytic syllabuses such as strong versions of TBLT which reject grammar-based syllabuses and rely on encouraging students to use the target language (L2) in meaning-based communicative tasks. The rationale for such syllabuses is that, based on SLA research findings, they trust learners to work out the formal aspects of the L2 implicitly for themselves, with help provided by the teacher who provides scaffolding and timely feedback.

Corrective recasts are feedback from the teacher which provide a reformulation of all or part of a learner’s immediately preceding utterance in which one or more non target like (lexical, grammatical, etc.) item is replaced by the corresponding target language form. In short, recasts are more target-like versions of learners’ non-target-like utterances.

There was a good debate about recasts in a special 2013 issue of the journal Studies in SLA between Goo and Mackey (2013) and Lyster and Ranta (2013) which dealt with the theoretical underpinnings of recast studies, mixed findings and methodological concerns. You won’t be surprised to hear that I think Goo and Mackey’s paper (“The case against the case against recasts”) won the debate, but I invite you to read the quite non-technical papers for yourselves.

What follows is my version of Mike Long’s (2007, 2015) discussion of corrective recasts.

Why corrective recasts are useful

Long says that corrective recasts are useful because

• They convey needed information about the target language in context where interlocutors share a joint attentional focus and when the learner already has prior comprehension of at least part of the message, thereby facilitating form-function mapping.
• Learners are vested in the message as it’s their message which is at stake and so will probably be motivated and attending, conditions likely to facilitate noticing of any new linguistic information in the input.
• Since they already understand part of the recast, they have additional freed-up attentional resources that can be allocated to the form-function mapping. They also have the chance to compare the incorrect and correct utterances.

Long gives a review of cross-sectional and longitudinal studies of recasts in SLA and shows that there is clear evidence that the linguistic information recasts contain is both useable and used. All the studies show that recasts exist in relatively high frequencies in both classroom-based and noninstructional settings observed. Learners notice the negative feedback that corrective recasts contain; the feedback is useable and used, and recasts appear to work better than most explicit modelling.

Objections and Reply

Lyster and Ranta (2013), mentioned above, claim

• The function of recasts can often be ambiguous.
• “Uptake” as a result of recasts is sparse.

Long argues that while the function of some recasts can be ambiguous, that doesn’t negate their usefulness. He notes, interestingly, that the risk of ambiguity seems to be greater in immersion courses and in some task-based and content-based lessons.

As to the “sparse uptake” argument, Long challenges the way the construct of “uptake” is used by Lyster and Ranta – and others - and highlights weaknesses in both study methods and data interpretation. These concerns are taken up by Goo and Mackey (2013). What’s interesting is how carefully and rationally Long scrutinises the literature. His discussion, added to by Goo and Mackay, highlights just how tricky investigating aspects of SLA is. How can we operationalise the construct “uptake” so that our studies are as rigorous as possible? How can we best articulate the research questions that drive the study? How can we organise a study so that it focuses carefully on its well-articulated research questions? How can we use statistical measures to interpret the data? How else can we interpret the data? And so on. It makes instructive reading for all those doing an MA in TESOL and I have often pointed my own tutees to Long’s work as a good example of a critical scholar at work.

With regard to uptake, one point stands out: no form of feedback will always have immediate corrective effects “least of all as measured by spoken production, which is often one of the very last indications of change in an underlying grammar, whether induced by recasts or otherwise” (Long, 2007, p. 99). Given that data on the immediate effects by themselves are unreliable, how much weight do we give to different measures of the effectiveness of different kinds of correction? Long discusses these issues, of course, but they indicate just how difficult it is to study things like recasts. I think we have to be very strict, honest and careful when we look at all this. We have to keep our critical antenna twitching as we evaluate the evidence, and, from my side of the debate, I’d stress that there’s an inbuilt bias towards looking at the immediate effects of instruction – because it favours the case for explicit teaching of grammar.

Anyway, onward thru the fog we must go, armed with rationality and empirical evidence, because otherwise we’ll be ruled by people like Conti and Ur and Harmer and Dellar and all manner of fools who try to trick us with mere "prejudice and the assays of bias", anecdotes, folk law and bullshit, eh what??

Perceptual Salience

Long’s chapter continues by looking at recasts and perceptual salience. The relationship between the saliency of linguistic targets and the relative utility of models, recasts, and production-only opportunities is discussed. If there’s any interest in this among readers, I’ll deal with it in a separate post. Perceptual salience is fascinating, don’t you think? No really, it is. What stands out when we’re learning? What happens to the non-salient bits? Does saliency explain putative fossilisation?? Is Dellar right in his attempts to get advanced learners to memorise thousands of esoteric lexical chunks? (Spoiler: No, he isn’t.)

Conclusion

If we want to teach well, we need a good grasp of the most effective way to give feedback to our students when they make mistakes. As always in ELT, there’s no definitive answer to the question “What’s the best way?”. It depends, it really does. It depends crucially, as Long is keen to stress, on local factors that only the teacher in that situation can evaluate. Long stresses that precisely how teachers interact with their learners in their own environment is their decision. He highlights the hopeless inadequacies of current ELT practice, but he never, ever, tells teachers what to do.

Research suggests that coursebook-based teaching, based on the presentation and practice of pre-selected bits of the language, is unlikely to be as effective as basing teaching on real communication. And research suggests (sic) that recasts are an effective way of helping learners notice their mistakes and to make progress.

Against this, we have the unprincipled, over-confident assertions of Conti and a motley crew of ELT trainers and gurus, all promoting their own commercial wares, who confidently say, with equal force, that recasts work and that they don’t. Among them there are real charlatans and a bunch of well-intentioned fools. Too many of them talk ill-informed, populist nonsense on their blogs, publish “How to” books by the score, tour the world peddling their snake oil, and prey on teachers who haven’t had the chance to find out for themselves just how bad the advice they’re being sold really is.

One way to fight them is through rational criticism.

References

Conti, G & Smith, S. (1998). ?The Language Teacher Toolkit.???

Conti, G. The Language Gym. https://gianfrancoconti.com/

Goo, K. & Mackay, A. (2013) The case against the case against recasts. Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 35, 1.

Lyster R, Ranta L. (2013) Counterpoint piece: the case for variety in corrective feedback research. Studies in Second Language Acquisition. 35, 1, 167-184.

Long, M. (2007). Problems in SLA. Erlbaum.

Long, M. (2015. SLA and TBLT. Routledge.