The Role of Structure Novelty on the Efficacy of Recasts: An Experimental Study on Iranian Upper-intermediate EFL students

Abstract

recent developments regarding error correction demonstrate an increasing interest in finding the determining elements that are influential in the effectiveness of recasts. In line with this trend, present paper aims at investigating the effect of structure novelty on the effectiveness of two types of recasts, namely combination recast and single-move recast. To this end, 60 upper-intermediate students in 4 classes were chosen to form 2 experimental groups (each 2 classes formed 1 experimental group), and later the two above-mentioned corrective feedback were utilized by the teacher in each experimental group to correct the erroneous utterances stemming from both newly and previously learned structures. To collect the required data students participated in 10-minute discussion for 10 sessions. Then two paired t-tests were administered after the treatment to compare the performance of both groups on the post-test. The results indicated that structure novelty is a determining factor regarding the effectiveness of the recasts owing to two reasons. Firstly, while both types of recasts acted the same on correcting the incorrect structures rooted in the previously-learned structures, combination recasts were more effective over single-move recasts in correcting the fallacious structures emanated from newly-learned structures. Secondly, upper intermediate students whom are believed to benefit from recasts (Ammar and Spada, 2006; Philip, 2003) due to their high proficiency couldn't make the most of recasts as their erroneous utterances stemmed from their novel and newly-learned structures.