Recast as Feedback and Accuracy Issue in EFL Writing Classes(2)
Participants
The research investigated the effect of teacher feedback on the accuracy of writing products of 60 EFL non-majors through revision and self-repair on a )16 week English program course at the Islamic Azad University (Ardabil Branch). All students were female and were interviewed at the beginning of the course whether they have already attended any English classes or not. The participants were assigned into two equal groups. Before proceeding any further, the participants were asked to write two paragraphs about two simple subjects. The genre was descriptive one. The researcher soon realized that the participants were false beginners. Later on, the participants' raw scores in the university entrance exam were taken to assure the homogeneity of the groups. Too, the researcher administered a pre-test at the beginning of the course in order to satisfy the homogeneity factor. The raw scores of the performance of the participants of both groups were specified. Then the mean score of both groups was determined. Through Nest, the groups were found to be homogeneous since there was no significant difference between the performances of them. Further homogeneity was guaranteed by assigning the participants in two distinct groups based on ranges determined by their performance in the pre-test.
Procedure
The whole procedure can be divided into two distinct stages. In the first stage, the researcher tried to build the threshold level of lexico-grammar of the target languagesystemic knowledge -for the learners of both groups in order to prepare them for the main stage of the study. This in-class activity included the presentation of some
simple reading comprehension passages to the class each session. By working on these materials in the classroom, the researcher raised consciousness of the participants to some grammatical points from time to time. The final stage, i.e. the main stage was related to the treatment of the errors the learners committed in their assignments. One group-recast group-received feedback on their writing products as implicitly as possible. For example, not all the errors of writing products of this group were specified. For the other group, the researcher designed codes, defined the codes, and explained them for the participants while asking them to take these codes in their revision into serious consideration. In other words, the treatment of the errors was approached as explicitly as possible. Locating the errors as well as identifying the type of errors were the bonus for the participants of this group.
Two classes were observed. In both classes, three pieces of writing involved participants writing a draft, receiving researcher feedback and then writing a revised version of their assignment. The researcher administered a pre-test at the beginning of the course in order to satisfy the homogeneity factor in the one hand and meet the issue of readiness of the participants for particular structure(s) through specifying the most common type of errors the students committed on the other. Then the researcher started assigning the writing tasks for the learners of both groups. These writing tasks included both test writing done in the class, and assignment writing which students were expected to do at home. For some sessions at the beginning of the course, i.e. the first stage, the researcher treated the errors of the written products of the participants in both group as follows: Circling, underlining, providing the proper words, completing the sentences, as well as reformulating of those words, sentences and phrases which were not clear syntactically or semantically. In fact, the purpose of this section was reinforcing the primary knowledge the instructor expected to be built on the part of the participants. Marginal comments as well as some extra explanations were utilized in this stage. The participants were required to study the comments and explanations closely and take advantages from those explanations in their following drafts. The drafts in both groups were returned in the following session while asking the participants to revise and correct their papers. In order to establish the target structures and encourage the learners to keep on writing, some translation activities were incorporated into the procedures of the classes, too. These translation activities were designed in a way that it could elicit new structures presented to the participants each session. They were asked to translate presented sentences into the target language. After revising and correcting, the participants attached the new drafts to the previous one that contained the errors and gave them back to the teacher. Having collected the drafts, the researcher reviewed them to see the effectiveness of the instructions as well as specifying the area of difficulty if there was any. In case of any global problem, the researcher explained the point(s) very briefly to both groups once more at the beginning of the following session. Paraphrasing was the other strategy utilized in the classrooms. The researcher presented a simple passage to the participants each session asking them to read the passage carefully and then rewrite it while putting great emphasis on using their own words. The very written products of the participants received the same treatment as stated above.
All activities described above continued during the course. Later on, the treatment. of the errors of the drafts of the participants in the two classes was entered into a new stage. Five sessions to the end of the course included the second or main stage of the study. The errors of the written products of the explicit group were underlined and codified, which came to be called explicit error feedback. The codes were already
defined through instructions and explained for the students to be used during revision. The errors of the written products of the other group just underlined but with no codes, which came to be called recasting. In some occasions, the researcher corrected the errors of this group partially. The students were asked to revise their drafts in the following sessions and correct errors based on the instruction provided before for them. This procedure continued until one session to the end of the course. The researcher assigned the students to write about a topic proposed by the researcher himself as a final writing test in the class. The obtained data were analyzed by determining the number of T-units and counting the number of Error-free T-units in each draft. The performance of the participants in each group was determined with respect to the number of correct T-units. T-unit was used as a measure of linguistic accuracy in this study since its reliability has been proved through various studies (Polio, 1997 The more Error-free T-units, the more accurate the learners' performance interpreted. Statistical procedures used to analyze all of the data included descriptive (percentages, means, and standard deviation) and t-test to assess differences across the groups in terms of their performance.
Instructional Materials
At the beginning of the course, the researcher selected some simple reading passages in the form of hand-out and presented them to the participants. The next step was to assign a book entitled "A First Book in Comprehension Precis and Composition" by L. G. Alexander 1965. Since the main purpose of this study was to handle simple sentences, the first chapter of this book was found to be more appropriate in this respect. Moreover, the book was organized in a way that it encouraged the participants to write more.
One more book was assigned to the participants of each group. That was "English Grammar in Use" by Raymond Murphy 1995 Some units of this book were selected and taught for the participants of both groups. Each unit of this book is followed by some related tests. These tests were also handled in the class in order to highlight those structures needed for the participants to perform in the process of writing.
RESULTS
Table 1 below represents the descriptive statistics for the study: Table 1
|
GROUP -Mean |
|
Std. Dev. |
|
RECAST |
3939 |
20.82 |
|
EXPLICIT |
78.03 |
13.82 |
As Table 1 shows, the mean of recast group is 39.39 and that of explicit group is 78.03. The high value of mean score of the explicit group indicates the outperformance of the participants in this group. Additionally the low standard deviation of the explicit group represents the superiority of the performance of the explicit group in the final test.
Below is table 2, representing the results of a T-test applied to see the differences between the means of groups:
Table2
|
GROUPS
|
MEAN
|
NO. |
DF. |
T. VALUE
|
P. VALUE |
|
RECAST
|
39.39
|
30 |
29 |
-7.23 |
0.000 |
|
EXPLICIT
|
78.03
|
30 |
Taking the obtained T value, i.e. (t = -7.23), with P value of (P<0.000), we easily realize that there is a highly significant difference between the performances of these two groups. In other words, the mean of the number of Error-free T-units has increased significantly in the explicit group as far as the degree of explicitness has maximized through locating the errors and specifying the type of the errors by labeling.
Discussion and Conclusion
As a matter of fact, different factors such as context of situation, time, level of proficiency, age of the learners, etc. are crucial in terms of the effectiveness of recasts as a type of negative implicit feedback. One of the points in this study was the participant themselves. In fact, the participants of this study were non-majors and they studied math. They suffered from lack of an appropriate level of proficiency. It is argued that learners are apt to take recast as a confirmation on meaning in advanced levels. The low proficiency level of the participants put a great hurdle in front of them so that they could not take much more benefit from recast effect in their performance. Put in simple words, the language itself was the main point of study in the setting and the participants of this group did not tolerate any ambiguity imposed by recasting. Context of situation might be another factor decreased the efficacy of recasting in this study. As it is clear, this study was conducted in the classroom context where English was regarded as a foreign language. Different results have been reported concerning the issue of context. For example, Doughty 1999 cited in Nicholas et al. 2001
suggests that recasts in L2 classrooms are effective if they are accompanied by some different cues, telling learners that it is the form and not only the meaning of the utterance that is in focus. And this in turn is an indication of the priority of explicitly provision of feedback. Lyster ( 1998 b), on the other hand, casts doubt on the
effectiveness of recasts in the classroom setting arguing that "recasts may be less successful at drawing learners attention to their non-target output at least in contentbased classes where results risk being perceived by young learners as alternative or identical forms fulfilling discourse functions other than corrective ones . . .. Recasts tend to provide or seek confirmation or additional information related to the learners' message. Thus recasts of grammatical errors probably do not provide young classroom learners with negative evidence." The exception for the above-mentioned points about context may be some foreign language classrooms in which students' and teachers' focus on form is more consistently on the language itself. Consistent with those studies that have reported on the effectiveness of negative feedback in the
classroom (e.g. Tomassello & Herron, 1998), the result of the present study has
suggested that negative evidence is effective in helping foreign learners to master L2
properties if the very evidence was more explicit. Labeling the errors of the drafts of the explicit group served as a vehicle in highlighting the types of errors for the participants so that they could easily notice the mismatches between the target feature and the produced ones.
The finding of this study is consistent with theoretical claim proposed by Lyster and Ranta 1997 As a matter of fact, they cast doubt on the effectiveness of recast if maximum uptake is expected. They actually believe that recasts lead to the least uptake. Providing corrective feedback, in their opinion, should be accompanied by some cues in order to attract the learners' attention to discrepancies between the target language forms and ill-formed utterances. It is obvious that Lyster and Ranta are in the side of explicit pole.
It can be concluded that in EFL contexts, writing instructors should provide the more explicit feedback especially if the learners are at the lower level of proficiency. They should devote enough time and energy to provide appropriate feedback to their learners.
In fact, writing instructors need to be aware of the extent of the explicitness to which EFL students value their feedback. One implication concerning the finding of this study is the fact that there seems to be an immediate advantage to more explicit corrective feedback for the learner writers. Hence the instructors should devote time for this purpose and specify the type of the errors in the learners' drafts. Providing codes and defining them for the learners at the beginning of the course would be beneficial especially if these codes be accompanied with brief explanation of L2 features.
Overt classroom instruction through providing models is only one part of language teaching process; providing feedback for the learners is another. How to provide feedback for the learners and with what degree of explicitness in different settings are some issues that need more exploration. Basically we need to consider so many factors such as learners' language proficiency, the level of learners' motivation, the context of situation, learners' attitudes, etc. while giving feedback (Ferris, 19 9 V), Course goals are also important (Leki, 1990 cited in Truscott, ) 1996
In sum, while providing feedback, we should take various factors such as context of situation, course goals, and proficiency level of our learners, etc. into consideration. This study addressed the context issue and learners' proficiency level in relation to accuracy and the implicit type of negative feedback. The study resulted in advising the instructors to provide more explicit feedback if more accuracy in written performance of the learners is expected. The specific circumstance under which this study has been carried out should not also be neglected. In fact, in exact terms of Schachter 1991 "when the dust settles, we fully expect that we will have answers to the negative evidence question like "yes, under these circumstances with these aspects of language with these age groups" and "no under those circumstances with those aspects of language with those age groups". In fact, when we hear conflicting claims, we should not be disturbed; each of these studies addresses one aspect of language under one circumstance. Each is a piece of puzzle and it will take a while to see what the final picture looks like. In fact we should bear in our mind that the kind of knowledge to be learned, the kind of evidence presented to the learner, the situation in which learning takes place and the cognitive capabilities of the learner all play a part in the efficient and non-efficient use of cognitive evidence."
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