Students' Beliefs about Oral Corrective Feedback in ESL and EFL Environments

Recasts
Name:
Institution:
Course:
Date:
Rationale
Various studies have investigated the importance of using oral corrective feedback in second language classroom. Oral corrective feedback (CF) refers to the peer and teacher responses to errors in second language learning (Kartchava & Ammar, 2014a, p.20). According to Ellis (2015, p. 80) when CF has been utilized during interaction, there have been positive effects on learning, and the corrective learning strategies can be implicit or explicit and promote inputs or enhanced output performance. This is relevant since CF during interaction is associated with improved learning, and learners also pay attention to forms that are important and yet maybe overlooked (Ellis, 2015, p. 163). When students are made aware about the importance of CF in learning a foreign language they are less likely to be anxious about the learning process (Zhang, M. Rahim, 2014, p. 430). This helps them to better connect with the content as they are confident in their abilities. Teachers need to understand this aspect to be in apposition to fine tune their teaching techniques. Hence, when we understand the learners’ beliefs about oral CF, this provides insights on how to improve learning.
There are various types of feedback and these are, explicit correction, recasts, clarification requests, metalinguistic information, elicitation and repetition. Explicit corrections involve the teachers supplying the correct forms along with the indications of what the student has correctly said (Sasan & Abdi, 2016, pg. 58). Clarification requests on the other hand are associated with the teachers using phrases such as I don’t understand or pardon. In the metalinguistic information approach, the teacher will provide the student with comment, information or comments associated with the student making well-formed utterances (Sasan & Abdi, 2016, pg. 58). Elicitation on the other hand involves the teacher directly eliciting for reformulation from the learners. This is done through asking the student questions and/or by pausing to allow the student to respond to the teacher’s utterance. It is also common for the teacher to ask the student to reformulate their own utterances. Lastly are the recasts, where the teacher reformulates all/ or parts of the utterances made by the student without explicitly saying that the utterances made by the student are wrong (Sasan & Abdi, 2016, pg. 58). According to (Ellis, 2015) Recast is more indirect and implicit where teachers identify the errors and provide correction. RS is important as the learners replace the erroneous parts of the language target form, and it is one of the methods where errors are addressed where the high-level learners benefit most from the recasts (Kartchava & Ammar, 2014b, p.87). There are various qualitative studies on the effectiveness of RS, focusing on the learning of pronunciation, vocabulary but not much on grammar. These findings are inconclusive. What is needed is an examination of the factors that make recast effective in L2 grammar learning. This considering that recasts are found to be effective depending specific language areas such as on pronunciation or grammar (Sasan & Abdi, 2016, pg. 66). Hence, th...