Students� attitudes towards the use of poetry in second language classrooms (original) (raw)

""Over the past few years, the controversial issue of recasts as an error correction technique has long been raised and searched. Research on recasts has produced mixed findings, hence raising concerns about its effectiveness in relation to learner's uptake, particularly, in meaning-oriented classrooms. A number of studies on corrective feedback persistently indicate that although teachers use a variety of implicit negative feedback of which recasts are the most frequent type, the efficiency of recasts in triggering learner' immediate repair has been questioned (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). In contrast, other studies, conducted in communicative-oriented contexts, have concluded findings which show a positive effect for recasts (Ayoun, 2001; Braidi, 2002; Doughty&Valera, 1998; Han, 2002; Havranek, 2002; Iwashita, 2003; Leeman, 2003; Macky & Philip, 1998; Oliver & Macky, 2003). To shed more light on this issue, the current study makes an attempt to investigate whether the respective findings hold true when teachers use recasts in young adult EFL contexts. Accordingly, in the present study, 16 hours of naturally-occurring interaction between a teacher and students including different patterns of feedback and their relationship to uptake and immediate repair of errors were all audiotaped, transcribed, and analyzed based on the categories identified in Lyster and Ranta's model of discourse corrective feedback (1997). Of the total turns involving 306 student turns as well as 259 teacher turns, 177 episodes containing a trigger, a feedback move, and a subsequent uptake in response to the feedback were counted. The findings which are on the basis of the frequency and distribution of recasts in comparison to those of other types of feedback in addition to the relationship of recasts with learner's uptake indicate: 1) recasts were found to be the most frequently preferred corrective technique used by the teacher, even though this CF technique yields the least uptake; 2) learner's repair in response to recasts is frequently accompanied by repetition; 3) in those cases that recasts lead to needs repair, acknowledgment is seen as the frequent type of uptake applied by the learner; 4) when combined with other feedback techniques such as elicitation or clarification request, recasts can successfully elicit learner's immediate repair and uptake. Key words: recasts, uptake, self-repair, repetition, acknowledgment. ""