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Recasting
Chapter · February 2018
DOI: 10.1002/9781118784235.eelt0097
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Kazuya Saito
University College London
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 To appear in The TESOL encyclopedia of ELT (Wiley-Blackwell) 1
RECASTING
Kazuya Saito
Birkbeck, University of London
Abstract
Among the many corrective feedback techniques at ESL/EFL teachers' disposal, recasting has
been identified the most frequent and preferred type of feedback in response to students’
pronunciation, vocabulary and grammar errors. According to the extensive literature, recasts can
be effectively used to help students improve their linguistic accuracy in meaning-oriented
classrooms. However, it is noteworthy that students do not always succeed in identifying recasts
as corrections when their linguistic errors do not directly cause communication breakdown
and/or when they do not have much second language (L2) knowledge to notice and self-correct
their non-targetlike production after teachers’ recasts. To promote the continued growth of
students’ L2 abilities, it is recommended that teachers increase the saliency of feedback by
providing it in the context of form-focused tasks with metalinguistic information; in this way, the
pedagogical potential of recasts can be maximized.
 To appear in The TESOL encyclopedia of ELT (Wiley-Blackwell) 2
Framing the Issues
When classroom learners are encouraged to speak a second language (L2), they
inevitably make a wide range of pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar errors. How teachers
should correct these linguistic errors to optimally enhance their students' speaking proficiency is
thus an important question. On the one hand, in classrooms which focus on the accurate use of
the language from the onset of learning (e.g., audio lingual methods), teachers can provide
explicit correction via some form of metalinguistic explanation. On the other hand, it remains
open to debate how teachers should correct students’ linguistic errors in meaning-oriented
classrooms (e.g., communicative language, content-based teaching methods). Most teachers let
students talk freely without much concern for the errors they make, since message conveyance is
prioritized. Teachers tend to provide interactional feedback only when their students’ errors
substantially hinder successful comprehension (Lightbown & Spada, 2012).
Among the many feedback techniques at ESL teachers' disposal, recasts have received by
far the most attention in the field of L2 education studies. Recasts are defined as “the teacher’s
reformulation of all or part of a student’s utterance minus the error” (Lyster & Ranta, 1997). One
such example is as follows:
Example (Ellis & Sheen, 2006, p. 581)
Student: What do you spend with your wife? (← trigger)
Teacher: Ah, how do you spend? (← recasts)
Student: How do you spend? (← repair)

In this teacher-student interaction, the teacher had difficulty understanding what the
student intended to say due to his/her linguistic error (i.e., trigger). Subsequently, the teacher
reformulated the student’s non-targetlike production (i.e., recasts). Finally, the student
demonstrated some kind of noticing and learning by immediately repeating the teacher’s recast
(i.e., repair).
Making the Case
In the first language literature, there is some evidence that babies tend to selectively
repeat their parents’ recasts (but not explicit corrections) (e.g., Farrar, 1992). Following this line
of thought, some L2 acquisition scholars strongly advocate that recasts are the most ideal
corrective feedback technique, precisely because of their implicitness (e.g., Long, 2007). Recasts
are assumed to enable teachers to not only signal that their students have committed linguistic
errors (i.e., negative evidence), but also to provide a model form (i.e., positive evidence) without
interrupting the communicative flow of the meaningful teacher-student interaction. This entire
conversational move is believed to promote students’ noticing and awareness of the gap between
their current linguistic level and the target language—the first step towards successful L2
learning (Goo & Mackey, 2013).
In addition to their potential benefits, many classroom observational studies have
identified recasts as the most frequent type of corrective feedback in a wide range of
instructional settings all over the world (e.g., Sheen, 2004). There is also some research evidence
showing that students likely prefer recasts to other types of corrective feedback because they
create a supportive, meaning-focused environment where students can work on their linguistic
errors (Yoshida, 2008).
However, other researchers have argued that recasts might not always lead to successful
L2 learning due to their ambiguity. That is, it has been highly contentious to what degree
 To appear in The TESOL encyclopedia of ELT (Wiley-Blackwell) 3
classroom learners who are mainly focused on communication can actually succeed in perceiving
recasts as corrections (e.g., Ellis & Sheen, 2006). Importantly, it is even possible that recasts can
mistakenly lead L2 students to fossilize non-targetlike forms, since they might appear to be
identical or alternative ways of saying the same thing in order to confirm message
comprehensibility (Lyster, 1998a). Subsequently, L2 education studies have been conducted in
order to descriptively and experimentally examine when and how teachers can enhance the
noticeability and saliency of recasts, and thus maximize their pedagogical potential.
 First and foremost, the nature of classroom discourse takes on an important role. For
example, recasts can be highly salient when they are used in a tutored setting, where students
receive individualized attention from teachers (Li, 2010). Lyster and Mori (2006) also found that
the pedagogical and organizational features of L2 instruction relate to the effects of recasts on
eliciting students’ uptake and repair (i.e., self-correction). In this comparison study, while young
French immersion students' attentional focus was exclusively on meaning, young Japanese
immersion students were more analytically orientated due to a number of repetition and readaloud activities, even during their content-based lessons. The emphasis on repetition and accurate
oral production in the latter immersion program led to more uptake and repair of feedback (i.e.,
students’ self-correction) than the former.
 Second, the linguistic characteristics of recasts are significantly predictive of their degree
of saliency. For example, reformulating only the erroneous parts of learners’ linguistic errors (i.e.,
partial recasts) with a falling intonation (i.e., declarative recasts) tends to trigger learner noticing
(Sheen, 2006). Furthermore, several empirical studies have confirmed the importance of
adopting more pedagogically-oriented corrective feedback techniques. Sheen (2007) examined
the pedagogical potential of metalinguistic correction (providing metalinguistic explanation
while reformulating L2 learners’ errors) on the use of English articles (e.g., “You should use the
definite article the because you’ve already mentioned fox”). The results showed that the
metalinguistic correction group significantly outperformed both the recast-only group and the
control group. A great deal of research attention has also been directed towards the effectiveness
of prompts as a feedback technique. When using prompts, teachers withhold correct forms and
push learners to make self-corrections via clarification requests (“Pardon?” “I don’t understand”),
elicitations (“How do you say that in English?”) and/or repetition of students’ non-targetlike
production. The relative efficacy of prompts over recasts has been confirmed, especially in
classroom settings (Lyster & Saito, 2010).
Another crucial variable concerns the linguistic targets of recasts. Several observational
studies have found that learners tend to generate more successful repair following pronunciationfocused recasts than morphosyntax-focused recasts (Sheen, 2006); and tend to perceive the
corrective intention of these recasts (e.g., Mackey, Gass, & McDonough, 2000). In his
descriptive study of French immersion classrooms, Lyster (1998b) noted that students showed a
higher rate of successful repair in response to pronunciation-focused recasts than to grammarfocused recasts; similar patterns have been also observed in various L2 classroom settings
(Sheen, 2006). In a laboratory setting, Mackey et al. (2000) found that, when asked to watch the
video clips of their task-based interaction with native speaking interlocutors (i.e., stimulated
recall sessions), two groups of learners (ESL and Italian as a foreign language) recognized
pronunciation-focused corrective feedback more accurately than morphosyntax-focused
corrective feedback. Importantly, Mackey et al. (2000) argued that the learners’ sensitivity to
phonological errors might be due to the fact that inaccurate pronunciation has “more potential to
seriously interfere with understanding” than morphosyntactic errors do (p. 493). Indeed, several
 To appear in The TESOL encyclopedia of ELT (Wiley-Blackwell) 4
quasi-experimental studies have empirically shown the amenability of recasts to L2
pronunciation development, owing especially to their perceived saliency (Saito, 2013).
The final affecting variable is learners’ individual characteristics. In terms of language
aptitude, some research has shown that students with high working and phonological memory,
attention control, and analytic ability tend to demonstrate high sensitivity to recasts (e.g.,
Trofimovich, Ammar, & Gatbonton, 2007). Since it is difficult to precisely measure and change
students’ innate language aptitude through instruction, what is more directly relevant to
pedagogy is the role of their differential L2 proficiency in determining the effectiveness of
recasts. That is, recasts can facilitate the reinforcement and automatization of what learners
already know rather than assist the acquisition of new knowledge. Following the well-established
developmental sequence of English question formation, Mackey and Philps (1998) found that
recasts positively influenced learners who almost mastered the target feature. In this regard,
Nichola, Lightbown and Spada (2001) pointed out that “recasts can be effective if the learner has
already begun to use a particular linguistic feature and is in a position to choose between
linguistic alternatives” (p. 752). This in turn suggests that L2 learners need a certain amount of
L2 knowledge in order to make the most of teachers’ recasts and integrate what they relearn into
their interlanguage system.
Pedagogical Implications
As detailed in the preceding section, recasts have been identified as the most frequentlyused as well as preferred corrective feedback technique in many communicatively-oriented L2
classrooms. This is because they enable teachers to draw students’ attention to their linguistic
errors while maintaining a primary focus on meaning conveyance. Yet, as alluded to earlier, the
provision of recasts runs the risk of students not perceiving teachers’ recasts as corrections. In
communicatively-oriented classrooms, students are primed to process language for meaning and
are unlikely to pay extra attention to their linguistic accuracy, unless their errors hinder
successful communication. In this subsection, I would like to provide a set of pedagogical
suggestions to ensure that recasts function as a useful pedagogic tool to promote students’
interlanguage development in an efficient and effective way.
First of all, it is important to remember that the saliency and effectiveness of recasts is
correlated with the extent to which the target structures impact perceived comprehensibility: The
more important target structures are for successful communication, the more easily students
notice and repeat teachers’ recasts. It has been shown that native speakers’ judgement of
successful comprehensibility in L2 speech is related to certain linguistic errors, such as
pronunciation errors (including segmentals and suprasegmentals) and the choice of contextually
appropriate vocabulary items (Isaacs & Trofimovich, 2012). When teachers see that students’
linguistic errors clearly result in communication breakdown, they should provide recasts and
elicit successful repairs. This whole sequence of the focus-on-form episode is thought to promote
the interlanguage development of not only fluent but also accurate language use (Gatbonton &
Segalowitz, 2005). Importantly, teachers need to ensure that their students have enough linguistic
knowledge (at least for target linguistic features) to understand why they made errors and how
they should repair them in response to recasts. Research has shown that recasts can be effective
for students to consolidate and automatize what they already know instead of helping them
acquire completely new linguistic knowledge (see Ellis & Sheen, 2006).
However, the corrective message in recasts can be quite ambiguous when they are
directed towards target linguistic structures which rarely cause communication breakdown. One
such example is the English regular past tense, -ed. Beginning L2 learners, in particular, are
 To appear in The TESOL encyclopedia of ELT (Wiley-Blackwell) 5
reported to overly rely on lexical items to signal the past tense (e.g., “yesterday” “two days ago”)
rather than accurately using the morphological marker, -ed (VanPatten, 2007).
Although one may ask if it is necessary to correct these “minor” errors, teachers may still
need to decide whether to provide recasts according to their students’ speaking proficiency and
ultimate learning goals. Of course, attaining the appropriate use of pronunciation and vocabulary
is a crucial characteristic of the initial stage of L2 speech learning (beginning to intermediate
level proficiency). Yet, refining grammatical and morphological accuracy is a necessary
condition for L2 learners to achieve more advanced L2 speaking proficiency (Isaacs &
Trofimovich, 2012).
As a remedy to increase the saliency of recasts on such unnoticeable linguistic features,
teachers should highlight and recast a few linguistic errors only instead of providing correction
on various linguistic errors extensively at the same time. Furthermore, research has suggested
that recasts can be effective when form-focused instructional options need to be introduced in
order to help students notice and practice target forms easily, even when their primary focus is
on meaning. For example, teachers can create tasks wherein learners are required to produce
certain linguistic features accurately for the purpose of successful task completion (i.e., formfocused tasks: Ellis, 2003). To increase the salience of the target structures, teachers can also
highlight them by means of emphatic stress or visual changes, such as italics, to induce learners
to notice the forms in oral and written L2 input (i.e., typographically enhanced input: Sharwood
Smith, 1993).
A good case study is Doughty and Varela’s (1998) oft-cited classroom project, whereby a
group of grade 8 ESL students were asked to write and present science reports, and compare
their initial predictions with the actual results of the experiments. During their presentations, an
instructor consistently provided recasts only on the errors which students made with the English
conditional past tense. The pre- and post-test results showed that students who received recasts
significantly improved on both the oral and written measures, and that their improvement was
retained until 4 months after the instruction, especially on the written measures.
SEE ALSO: Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), Corrective Feedback, Correcting Errors,
Effective Classroom Strategies, Error Analysis, Explicit Versus Implicit Grammar Instruction,
Focus on Form Versus Focus on Forms, Form-Focused Instruction, Input Enhancement,
Scaffolding Technique
References
Ellis, R. (2003). Task-based language learning and teaching. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Ellis, R., & Sheen, Y. (2006). Re-examining the role of recasts in L2 acquisition. Studies in
Second language Acquisition, 28, 575-600.
Farrar, M. (1992). Negative evidence and grammatical morpheme acquisition. Developmental
Psychology, 28, 90-98.
Gatbonton, E. & Segalowitz, N. (2005). Rethinking the Communicative Approach: A focus on
accuracy and fluency. Canadian Modern Language Review, 61 (3) 325-353.
Goo, J., & Mackey, A. (2013). The case against the case against recasts. Studies in Second
Language Acquisition, 35, 127-165.
Li, S. (2010). The effectiveness of corrective feedback in SLA: Meta-analysis. Language
Learning, 60, 309-365.
 To appear in The TESOL encyclopedia of ELT (Wiley-Blackwell) 6
Lightbown, P. M. & Spada, N. (2012). How languages are learned (4th edition). Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Long, M. H. (2007). Problems in SLA. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
Lyster, R. (1998a). Recasts, repetition, and ambiguity in L2 classroom discourse. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition, 20, 51-81.
Lyster, R. (1998b). Negotiation of form, recasts, and explicit correction in relation to error types
and learner repair in immersion classrooms. Language Learning, 48, 183-218.
Lyster, R., & Ranta, L. (1997). Corrective feedback and learner uptake. Studies in Second
Language Acquisition, 19, 37-66.
Lyster, R., & Mori, H. (2006). Interactional feedback and instructional counterbalance. Studies in
Second Language Acquisition, 28, 321-341.
Lyster, R., & Saito, K. (2010). Corrective feedback in classroom SLA: A meta-analysis. Studies
in Second Language Acquisition, 32, 265-302.
Mackey, A., Gass, S., & McDonough, K. (2000). How do learners perceive interactional
feedback? Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 22, 471-497.
Mackey, A., & Philps, J. (1998). Conversational interaction and second language development:
Recasts, responses and red herrings? Modern Language Journal, 82, 338-356.
Nicholas, H., Lightbown, P., & Spada, N. (2001). Recasts as feedback to language learners.
Language Learning, 51, 719-758.
Saito, K. (2013). The acquisitional value of recasts in instructed second language speech learning:
Teaching the perception and production of English /ɹ/ to adult Japanese learners.
Language Learning, 63, 499-529.
Sharwood Smith, M. (1993). Input enhancement in instructed SLA. Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, 15, 165-179.
Sheen, Y. (2004). Corrective feedback and leaner uptake in communicative classrooms across
instructional settings. Language Teaching Research, 8, 263-300.
Sheen, Y. (2006). Exploring the relationship between characteristics of recasts and learner
uptake. Language Teaching Research, 10, 361-392.
Sheen, Y. (2007). The effects of corrective feedback, language aptitude and learner attitudes on
the acquisition of English articles. In A. Mackey (Ed.), Conversational interaction in
second language acquisition: A collection of empirical studies (pp. 301-322). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Trofimovich, P., Ammar, A., & Gatbonton E. (2007). How effective are recasts? The role of
attention, memory, and analytical ability. In A. Mackey (Ed.), Conversational interaction
in second language acquisition: A series of empirical studies (pp. 171-195). Oxford:
Oxford University Press.
Trofimovich, P., & Isaacs, T. (2012). Disentangling accent from comprehensibility. Bilingualism:
Language and Cognition, 15, 905-916.
VanPatten, B. (2007). Input processing in adult SLA. In B. VanPatten & J. Williams (Eds.),
Theories in Second Language Acquisition (pp.115-135). Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum.
Yoshida, R. (2008). Teachers' choice and learners' preference of corrective feedback types.
Language awareness, 17, 78-93.
Further Reading
Mackey, A. (2012). Input, interaction, and corrective feedback in L2 learning. Oxford, UK:
Oxford University Press.
 To appear in The TESOL encyclopedia of ELT (Wiley-Blackwell) 7
Ellis, R. (2012). Language teaching research and language pedagogy. Chichester, UK: WileyBlackwell.
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