please summarise this article:

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REEXAMINING THE ROLE OF
RECASTS IN SECOND
LANGUAGE ACQUISITION
Rod Ellis
University of Auckland
Younghee Sheen
University of Nottingham
Recasts have continued to be the object of intensive empirical and
theoretical inquiry following Nicholas, Lightbown, and Spada’s (2001)
review. The current article identifies a number of problems with this
research and the supporting theory. These problems concern the fact
that recasts can take many different forms and perform a variety of
functions (not all corrective), which makes definition difficult. Also,
recasts, when corrective, can vary in terms of whether they constitute an implicit or explicit corrective strategy and in whether they afford
negative or positive evidence. Researchers have almost exclusively
examined recasts from a cognitive perspective, ignoring their social
and sociocognitive aspects. The significance of learner repair following recasts also remains controversial. Little is currently known about
the role that the learner’s developmental readiness plays in determining whether recasts work for acquisition. Researchers have not clearly
distinguished between intensive and extensive recasts, nor have they
considered their differential benefits. The acquisitional value of recasts
in comparison to other forms of corrective feedback might have been
overestimated. This article emphasizes the need for research that
examines the specific properties of recasts and the social and instructional conditions in which they occur.
We would like to thank various people for their comments on draft versions of this article: Rob
Batstone, Shawn Loewen, Alison Mackey, Jenefer Philp, Elaine Tarone, and two anonymous SSLA
reviewers+
Address correspondence to: Rod Ellis, Department of Applied Language Studies and Linguistics,
University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland, New Zealand; e-mail: r+ellis@auckland+ac+nz; or
Younghee Sheen, School of English Studies, University of Nottingham, University Park, Nottingham
NG7 2RD, United Kingdom; e-mail: aexyhs@nottingham+ac+uk+
SSLA, 28, 575–600+ Printed in the United States of America+
DOI: 10+10170S027226310606027X
© 2006 Cambridge University Press 0272-2631006 $12+00 575
Looking through key SLA journals ~Applied Linguistics, Language Awareness,
Language Learning, Language Teaching Research, Studies in Second Language
Acquisition, TESOL Quarterly!, one cannot help but be struck by the sheer number of articles that address recasts, especially in the last few years+ Since Nicholas, Lightbown, and Spada’s ~2001! review article on recasts, there have been
more than 12 recast articles published in these journals, more than on any
other single topic+ Most of these ~Braidi, 2002; Hauser, 2005; Iwashita, 2003;
Leeman, 2003; Mackey, Oliver, & Leeman, 2003; Panova & Lyster, 2002; Philp,
2003; Sheen, 2004! have been cross-sectional descriptive studies that document the use of recasts in different settings and under different participatory
structures ~e+g+, native speaker @NS#-nonnative speaker @NNS# as opposed to
NNS-NNS interaction!, often also examining the learners’ uptake of recasts+
Three ~Han, 2002; Ishida, 2004; Nabei & Swain, 2002! were longitudinal+ Two
~Ayoun, 2004; Lyster, 2004! were experimental studies designed to investigate
the relative effectiveness of recasts as opposed to other instructional strategies on acquisition+ Altogether, these articles demonstrate that recasts currently constitute an area of inquiry of great interest to SLA+
Recasts occur in episodes of this type1 ~for the transcription key, see the
Appendix!:
~1! T: When you were in school?
L: Yes+ I stand in the first row+ ~trigger!
T: You stood in the first row? ~recast!
L: Yes, in the first row, and sit, ah, sat the first row+ ~uptake!
A learner utterance that contains ~or is perceived as containing! an error ~line 2!
triggers the recast, which reformulates the utterance in accordance with the
interlocutor’s own linguistic norms ~line 3!+ Optionally, the learner might also
respond to the recast in some way ~commonly referred to as uptake!, sometimes repairing his or her original error and sometimes not @e+g+, the final turn
in ~1! constitutes an example of uptake without repair#+
Recasts are just one of several possible corrective strategies that teachers
employ to deal with learner errors+ Lyster and Ranta ~1997! identified five corrective strategies other than recasts ~i+e+, explicit correction, clarification
requests, metalinguistic information, elicitation, and repetition!, whereas
Panova and Lyster ~2002! added one more—translation+ Although these other
strategies have received attention from researchers, none of them has received
the same intensity of attention as recasts+
One reason is that recasts generally occur with great frequency in interactions with second language ~L2! learners, especially if they occur inside a
classroom+
2 Sheen ~2004!, in a study that compared the frequency of recasts
in immersion, communicative English as a second language ~ESL!, and English
as a foreign language ~EFL! contexts, found that, on average, 60% of all the
feedback moves involved recasts+ Braidi ~2002!, in a laboratory study of NS-NNS
dyads performing communicative tasks, reported that 15+45% of the NSs’
responses to erroneous utterances were recasts—a lower proportion, but still
576 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
substantial, especially given that Braidi excluded confirmation checks from
her count+ There is much evidence, then, that learners hear many recasts when
they make errors+ This alone might justify their choice as a favored object of
inquiry+ However, recasts are clearly not the only highly frequent discourse
move that occurs in interactions involving learners+ Learners probably receive
greater exposure to what Long, Inagaki, and Ortega ~1998! called models; these
are exchange-initial utterances that provide learners with positive evidence
about the L2 in the form of statements, questions, and instructions that model
specific linguistic features+ Also, as Ellis, Basturkmen, and Loewen ~2001!
showed, a substantial proportion of form-focused episodes that involve classroom learners are preemptive rather than reactive and, thus, do not involve
any kind of corrective strategy+
There are other reasons for researchers’ interest in recasts+ These are theoretical+ Studying recasts serves as a means of investigating two issues of
general theoretical importance in SLA+ The first issue concerns the roles of
positive and negative evidence in SLA+ The position adopted by strict generativists such as Schwartz ~1993! is that negative evidence might play a role
in the development of learned linguistic knowledge ~i+e+, explicit knowledge
of the L2! but not in the acquisition of competence ~i+e+, implicit knowledge of the L2!, which relies entirely on positive evidence+ Schwartz considered learned linguistic knowledge and competence to be distinct and
unconnected+ However, other theories ~e+g+, skill-building theories of the kind
advocated by DeKeyser, 1998!, have claimed that the two are connected
and that knowledge that begins in declarative form is gradually proceduralized and restructured as a result of, among other types of learner experience, access to negative feedback+ Clearly, a carefully designed study that
investigates the effects of recasts along with other forms of corrective feedback on a developing L2 can serve as a means of testing the claims of these
rival theories—assuming, of course, that recasts can be legitimately viewed
as a source of negative evidence and that assessment devices exist for distinguishing performance based on learned linguistic knowledge and competence+ As we will see, there have been a small number of studies that have
attempted this+
The second theoretical issue that has the potential to be addressed by
research on recasts concerns the relative impact of implicit and explicit types
of negative feedback+ Recasts are viewed as an implicit strategy+ Explicit correction, as illustrated in ~2!, directly signals to the learner that an error has
been committed+
~2! L: On May+
T: Not on May, in May+ We say “It will start in May+”
There are two related questions of importance here: ~a! Can explicit types of
feedback contribute to the development of learners’ competence ~implicit
knowledge! or do they simply feed into greater metalinguistic awareness
~explicit knowledge!? and ~b! If both explicit and implicit types of feedback
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 577
can contribute to the development of learners’ competence, is one type of
feedback more effective than the other? Long ~see Long, 1996; Long & Robinson, 1998! viewed recasts as implicit and claimed that they work for acquisition precisely because they are implicit+ He considered them effective because
they induce a joint focus on form and meaning, thereby encouraging formfunction mapping in the context of, and without disturbing, the communicative flow of the interaction+ Furthermore, they allow for cognitive comparison
of erroneous and target language forms in a context in which the learner is
primed to notice the difference+ In contrast, explicit forms of correction involve
treating language as an object and interrupting the flow of communication
and, thus, will not assist form-function mapping; for these reasons, Long considered them unlikely to promote acquisition+
Other researchers ~e+g+, R+ Ellis, 1993; Swain, 1995!, however, have argued
that raising learners’ consciousness by means of explicit techniques can contribute either directly or indirectly to interlanguage development+ It would follow from such a position that explicit correction of learner errors is effective,
possibly more so than implicit techniques ~such as recasts!, which always run
the danger of not being perceived as corrective in purpose+
For these reasons, recasts have been a focus of attention in SLA research+
Conveniently, they are readily available for study because of the large number of recasts to be found in interactions that involve learners+ Recasts, however, present a number of problems that need careful consideration+ The main
purpose of this article is to examine these problems+
WHAT IS A RECAST?
Nicholas et al+ ~2001! concluded their review of the recast literature by suggesting that L2 researchers, in contrast to first language ~L1! researchers, have
failed to solve definitional differences+ This is perhaps the most obvious problem because it makes it very difficult to compare the results obtained by different L2 studies of recasts, given that often enough these studies were not
looking at the same thing+ For example, Doughty and Varela ~1998! conducted
an experimental study of what they called corrective recasting, which consisted of two moves: ~a! a teacher repetition of a learner’s error, with emphasis placed on the erroneous word~s!, and ~b! a reformulation of the complete
learner utterance, as in ~3!+
~3! L: I think that the worm will go under the soil+
T: I think that the worm will go under the soil?
L: ~no response!
T: I thought that the worm would go under the soil+
L: I thought that the worm would go under the soil ~Doughty & Varela; p+ 124!+
Compare this recast with an example of a recast that occurs naturally in the
context of a communicative activity, as in ~4!+
578 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
~4! L: I went there two times+
T: You’ve been+ You’ve been there twice as a group?
L: Yeah+
In one respect, these recast episodes are similar in that they are both complex; that is, they involve more than one feedback move+ In ~3!, a repetition
precedes the recast move, whereas in ~4!, the recast is repeated+ In other
respects, however, they are very different+ In ~3!, the erroneous and corrected
forms are highlighted by means of emphasis, but in ~4!, they are not+ In ~3!,
the illocutionary force of the recast is self-evidently that of correcting the
learner, as reflected in the learner’s uptake+ In ~4!, the illocutionary force is
not so self-evident+ The teacher’s turn could have been easily understood as
a confirmation check and, judging from the learner’s response, was in fact so
taken+ It is not at all clear that we are looking at the same discoursal phenomenon in these two examples+
The literature on recasts is in fact replete with a whole host of terms that
describe the different kinds of recasts found to occur+ Farrar ~1992, p+ 92!, in a
study of recasts in child language acquisition, distinguished between corrective recasts ~“a recast that corrects a target error”! and noncorrective recasts
~“a recast that does not correct a target but models a target”!+ In SLA research,
Lyster and Ranta ~1997! used the same terms but defined noncorrective recasts
as reformulations of learners’ error-free utterances+ Another distinction of
potential importance is that between full recasts and partial recasts+ All of
the preceding examples are full recasts ~i+e+, they involve a reformulation
of the whole erroneous utterance!+ Example ~5! illustrates a partial recast, in
which only the part of the erroneous utterance containing the error is repeated+
~5! L: Yeah, Whitman comes to my mind+
T: Comes to mind+
Recasts can also be single or multiple; sometimes the interlocutor repeats
the recast, as in ~6!+
~6! L: Kal told me, your height is rather shorter+
T: Rather short+ Rather short+
As Braidi ~2002! noted, recasts can also occur in one-signal negotiated interactions or in extended negotiated interactions+ The given examples all illustrate one-signal negotiated interactions, but extended negotiated interactions
can also occur quite frequently ~they constitute more than 50% of Braidi’s data!+
Recasts also differ in terms of whether they are simple or complex ~Nelson,
Denninger, Bonvillian, Kaplan, & Bake, 1983!, which depends on whether the
changes to the learner’s erroneous utterance are minimal or substantial ~see
also Philp, 2003! and on the nature of the change—that is, whether it entails a
substitution of the erroneous form, an addition, a deletion, or a reordering of
the trigger utterance+ In short, recasts are chameleonlike+
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 579
To what extent, therefore, can all recasts be legitimately considered a single genus? There are two ways to answer this question+ One is to treat them
as a single genus and deal with the variations in terms of a coding system that
distinguishes their major characteristics+ The other approach is to acknowledge that the different types are in fact so distinct as to require a reclassification of recasts into a number of separate categories+ In essence, this problem
is very similar to the one facing biologists who seek to classify fauna and flora
in a principled manner+
In fact, though, the research to date has often fudged the whole problem+
Often, researchers operate with a general definition of recasts, a sample of
which are shown in Table 1+ However, with a few exceptions ~e+g+, Braidi, 2002;
Loewen & Philp, in press; Philp, 2003; Sheen, 2006!, these researchers have
made no attempt to investigate subcategories of recasts in accordance with
their differentiating characteristics+ Lyster and Ranta ~1997!, in their oftencited study, simply counted recasts, although Lyster ~1998b!, in a further analysis of the same data, distinguished four types of recasts+ Even when researchers
acknowledge that recasts are variegated, they are likely to generalize about
their role in the acquisition of an L2 as if they possess a homogeneous identity+
The definitions in Table 1 are subtly but significantly different+ Neither Lyster and Ranta’s ~1997! nor Braidi’s ~2002! definitions made reference to the
teachers’ and learners’ orientation to the discourse—that is, whether the primary focus of attention is on language as an object or on message-conveyance+
Table 1. Definitions of recasts
Reference Definition
Long ~1996, p+ 434! Recasts are utterances that rephrase a child’s utterance by changing one or more components ~subject, verb, object! while still
referring to its central meaning+
Lyster and Ranta
~1997, p+ 46!
Recasts involve the teacher’s reformulation of all or part of a student’s utterance minus the error+
Braidi ~2002, p+ 20! A response was coded as a recast if it incorporated the content
words of the immediately preceding incorrect NNS utterance and
also changed and corrected the utterance in some way ~e+g+, phonological, syntactic, morphological, or lexical!+
Long ~2006! A corrective recast may be defined as a reformulation of all or
part of a learner’s immediately preceding utterance in which one
or more nontargetlike ~lexical, grammatical, etc+! items are
replaced by the corresponding target language form~s!, and where,
throughout the exchange, the focus of the interlocutors is on
meaning not language as an object+
Sheen ~2006! A recast consists of the teacher’s reformulation of all or part of a
student’s utterance that contains at least one error within the
context of a communicative activity in the classroom+
580 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
Given the contexts in which their studies were carried out ~immersion classrooms and task-based interaction!, it can be assumed that the primary focus
was on the message, although it would seem likely that, even in these contexts, some repair sequences occurred that were motivated by form rather
than message+ Indeed, as they stand, their definitions of recasts would permit
the inclusion of reformulated utterances from interactions that arise in traditional, form-focused lessons+ Long’s ~1996, 2006! definitions seek to exclude
such form-focused reformulations; to qualify as a recast, the reformulation
must occur in the context of message-centered communication+ There is, however, an interesting difference between the two Long definitions+ Long’s ~1996!
definition states that a recast rephrases an erroneous learner utterance “while
still referring to its central meaning” ~p+ 434!+
3 In a more recent work, Long’s
~2006! definition requires that “throughout the exchange, the focus of the interlocutors is on meaning @italics added# not language as an object+” The difference is crucial and probably reflects Long’s desire to exclude reformulations
that refer to the central meaning of a learner utterance but that are clearly
didactic ~from the perspective of the person doing the recasting! rather than
communicative ~i+e+, they do not constitute an attempt to solve a communication problem!+
4
To clarify this important point, let us consider the examples in ~7! and ~8!+
~7! L: Korean is more faster+
T: Is faster+
L: Is faster than English+
~8! L1: What do you spend with your wife?
T: What? ~clarification request!
L1: What do you spend your extra time with your wife?
T: Ah, how do you spend? ~reduced recast!
L2: How do you spend+
In ~7!, it would appear that the teacher had no difficulty understanding what
the learner meant to say but, nevertheless, offered a recast that corrected the
learner’s grammatical error+ The teacher’s reformulation clearly refers to the
central meaning of the learner’s utterance, but rather than focus on meaning,
it momentarily treats language as an object+ It can be surmised that Long, in
accordance with his later definition, would not wish to consider the reformulation in ~7! a recast+ In contrast, the teacher’s reformulation in ~8! appears to
be motivated by an attempt to understand what the learner meant+ In this
episode, the interlocutors seem to be focused on meaning throughout; thus,
the reformulation constitutes a recast in Long’s later terms+ The distinction
between ~7! and ~8! is crucial for Long because, for him, recasts must necessarily be implicit and must not interrupt the communication+ Arguably, the
reformulation in ~7! is not implicit, and given that it treats language as an
object—albeit momentarily—it constitutes an interruption in the flow of communication+ It should be noted that the claim that recasts are implicit and
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 581
that they must not interrupt the flow of communication constitutes two distinct claims+ It should also be noted that it is possible for recasts to be viewed
as implicit without also insisting that they do not interrupt the flow of the
communication+ Such would appear to be Lyster’s ~1998b! position+
To decide whether “throughout the exchange the focus of the interlocutors is on meaning not language as an object” ~Long, 2006!, it is necessary to
determine the interlocutors’ intentions+ Is the reformulation didactically motivated or is it motivated by a need to clarify what is being said? In ~7! and ~8!,
the teacher’s intention can be determined with reasonable certainty by inferring it from the surrounding discourse, but in many cases, this is simply not
possible+ In ~9!, for example, it is not possible to tell whether the teacher is
trying to clarify the learner’s meaning or is simply correcting him+
~9! L: I think your height is proper+
T: Average?
L: You are average+
It might be possible to ascertain the interlocutors’ intentions by means of stimulated recall ~Gass & Mackey, 2000!, but this would pose an enormous burden
on researchers, nor could intentionality be established retrospectively with
any reliability+ In short, definitions that rely on interpreting the interactants’
intentions are highly problematic+
Perhaps the best solution to these problems would be to work with a very
general definition of recasts, along the lines of Sheen’s ~2006! definition+ This
type of approach recognizes that the recast must occur in the context of an
effort to communicate ~as opposed to some activity of the focus on forms
type! but makes no attempt to determine whether the recast is didactically
or communicatively motivated+ It would then be possible to subcategorize
recasts into distinct types depending on clearly distinguishable formal characteristics ~e+g+, length, number of changes, and type of change!, as in Lyster
~1998b!+ Lyster recoded the recasts from Lyster and Ranta ~1997! in terms of
four types: isolated declarative recasts ~a reformulation in an utterance with
falling intonation and no additional meaning!, isolated interrogative recasts
~a reformulation in an utterance with rising intonation and no additional meaning!, incorporated declarative recasts ~a reformulation in an utterance with
falling intonation and additional information!, and incorporated interrogative
recasts ~a reformulation in an utterance with rising information and additional information!+ What becomes crucial in developing such a taxonomy is
determining on the basis of which features recasts should be classified as
different types+ Given that there is currently no available theory to guide the
development of a taxonomy of recasts, the identification of relevant types
will have to be undertaken empirically+ One way to accomplish this is by
exploring the relationship between different types of recasts and successful
uptake ~as in Lyster, 1998b, and Sheen, 2006!+ A better way is by examining
what effect the different types of recasts have on acquisition ~as in Loewen
& Philp, in press!+
582 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
HOW IMPLICIT ARE RECASTS?
The prevailing view in the recast literature is that recasts constitute an implicit
form of negative feedback+ Lyster ~1998a! referred to their “function of implicitly @italics added# providing a reformulation” ~p+ 59!, whereas Long ~2006!
asserted unequivocally that “a recast is a discourse move that is by definition
implicit @italics added#+” However, what exactly does implicit mean here? Does
it mean that there are no overt linguistic signals that a recast is corrective in
nature? Or does it mean that the learner who receives the recast remains
unaware of the corrective nature of the recast? In either case, there are problems with the definition+
If we adopt a purely linguistic perspective, we need to decide which linguistic signals denote explicitness and which ones denote implicitness+ This is no
easy task+ For example, it might be argued that corrective recasts of the kind
used in Doughty and Varela’s ~1998! study @see ~3!# contained clear signals that
made the corrective force of the recast explicit+ First, the teacher repeated
the student’s erroneous utterance, stressing the deviant parts+ Second, the
teacher reformulated the utterance, again stressing the corrected items+ This
procedure was specifically designed to make the corrected items salient to
the learners+ In so doing, it arguably made the corrective nature of the recasts
quite explicit+ Doughty and Varela’s recasts were in fact didactic rather than
communicative in nature+ Didactic recasts, in general, are likely to be quite
explicit+ Consider again ~5!–~7!, all of which would seem to contain didactic
recasts and all of which made the corrective nature of the recast quite explicit+
In ~5!, the explicitness derives from the fact that the recast was a single word,
spoken with a falling intonation, which signals that a statement rather than a
question was intended+ In Lyster’s ~1998b! taxonomy, this is an example of an
isolated declarative recast+ In ~6!, the teacher made it clear that he ~the teacher
was, in fact, male! was correcting the learner by repeating the recast twice+ In
~7!, the teacher used emphatic stress to signal that he was making a correction+ Arguably, recasts should not be viewed as necessarily implicit but, rather,
depending on the linguistic signals that encode them and the discoursal context, they should be taken as more or less implicit or explicit+ In other words,
recasts can lie at various points on a continuum of linguistic implicitnessexplicitness+ However, precisely which linguistic and discoursal features distinguish implicit and explicit recasts remains to be discovered+
An alternative approach is to adopt the receiver’s perspective and attempt
to establish how learners view the recasts to which they are exposed+ There
are two ways in which this might be undertaken+ One way is by examining to
what extent the recasts result in greater metalinguistic awareness+ The reasoning that underlies this approach is that if learners treat recasts explicitly
as corrections, they are more likely to reflect on them and develop some conscious representation of the underlying pattern or rule+ Conversely, if they
respond to them implicitly, they might internalize but not demonstrate awareness of the pattern or rule+ It is also possible that some learners who respond
to recasts implicitly will neither become aware nor internalize+ Long et al+’s
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 583
~1998! study provided evidence to suggest that learners do in fact develop
metalinguistic awareness as a result of exposure to recasts+ All eight students
who learned Spanish adverb word order ~i+e+, verb-adverb-object! through
recasts were able to explicitly and correctly formulate an explanation of the
rule+ If we adopt the learners’ perspective, it would appear that the recasts
were responded to explicitly, although it is possible that the explicit representation of the rule was derived after the actual treatment+ Further evidence of
metalinguistic awareness through exposure to recasts comes from Han’s ~2002!
study of eight ESL learners, as evidenced in their self-correction behavior+
Learners who received the recasts were more likely to self-correct past tense
errors, the target of the recast treatment, than a control group+ This might be
seen as evidence of the fact that they had formed an explicit rule+ It can be
argued that learners only achieve this kind of metalinguistic awareness from
recasts if they are treated as explicit feedback+ Indeed, the fact that the learners received frequent, intensive recasts directed at a single structure ~as in
Doughty & Varela’s, 1998, and Han’s studies! encouraged the treatment of
recasts as explicit feedback+ It might also be argued, however, that learners
with well-developed metalinguistic knowledge ~such as adults who have experienced traditional form-focused instruction! are more likely to perceive recasts
as explicit correction than learners with less well-developed metalinguistic
knowledge ~such as children learning in an immersion context!+ Sheen ~2004!
showed that adult learners in EFL and ESL classes produced higher levels of
successful uptake following recasts than children in immersion classrooms, a
finding that might reflect differences in these learners’ metalinguistic knowledge as well as the extent to which they perceived the recasts as explicit+
A second way of investigating how learners respond to recasts is to ask
them directly+ Using stimulated recall, Mackey, Gass, and McDonough ~2000!
investigated L2 learners’ perceptions of feedback moves, including recasts+
This study found that feedback on morphosyntax was seldom perceived as
being about morphosyntax, whereas feedback on phonology and lexis was perceived more accurately+ Feedback on morphosyntax typically took the form
of recasts, whereas feedback on phonology and lexis involved other strategies ~e+g+, requests for clarification!+ This study thus indicated that learners
were not aware of the corrective force of the recasts and did not attend to the
reformulated morphological features, which suggests evidence of the implicit
nature of the recasts+ It should be noted, however, that the recasts were not
focused on any specific grammatical target in this study and, judging from the
examples provided, the recasts were predominantly communicative rather than
didactic in nature+
Determining the implicitness or explicitness of recasts in terms of learners’ perceptions of them forces us to address another problem: whether the
reformulated feature in the recast is noticed by the learner and whether noticing implicates explicitness+ Noticing implies at least some degree of conscious attending ~Schmidt, 2001!; however, it need not imply that the learner
has treated the recast as a correction+ Learners can carry out the kind of cognitive comparison ~R+ Ellis, 1993! that has been hypothesized to foster acqui584 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
sition while continuing to view the recast communicatively ~e+g+, as a request
for confirmation or simply as a conversational lubricant!; that is, noticing can
occur irrespective of how the learner interprets the illocutionary force of the
recast+ Of course, it remains a matter of interest whether the noticing that
occurs when the recast is responded to as implicit negative feedback is more
or less effective in promoting acquisition than the noticing ~and concomitant
metalinguistic understanding! that arises when the recast is responded to as
explicit negative feedback+ To the best of our knowledge, there is no study
that has attempted to address this crucial question+ This is another reason
why we should not reject recasts that didactically involve a time-out from communicating+ It might be that such recasts are precisely the ones that are most
useful for acquisition+
To sum up, recasts cannot be viewed as a purely implicit form of negative
feedback+ In many cases, their illocutionary force as corrections is quite transparent and, therefore, they should be seen as a relatively explicit form of negative feedback+ Again, what is important is to resist theorizing about recasts
as if they are homogeneous and monolithic and, instead, to acknowledge the
diversity of their form and function and of learners’ responses to them+
DO RECASTS SUPPLY POSITIVE OR NEGATIVE EVIDENCE?
Positive evidence consists of samples of what is grammatical or acceptable in
the L2; it arises naturally in communication+ Negative evidence is information
about what is ungrammatical or unacceptable; it is available not only through
feedback but also through explicit grammar teaching+ We have already seen
that the whole question of the role of negative evidence in SLA is controversial ~see Carroll, 2001, and Long, 1996!, but this is not our current concern+
Here we consider whether recasts constitute a source of negative evidence+
Nicholas et al+ ~2001! considered that it is not clear whether recasts are to
be viewed as providing negative evidence or just positive evidence+ Whether
recasts afford positive or negative evidence is again tied up with how learners interpret their illocutionary force+ If learners have no conscious awareness that the recast is intended to be corrective, then recasts are to be seen
as providing only positive evidence+ Conversely, if they are interpreted as corrective, then they constitute a source of negative evidence+ Thus, recasts can
constitute ~a! positive evidence only or ~b! both negative and positive evidence+ As we have seen, how learners interpret recasts is, in part, a function
of the formal signals contained in the recast and the discoursal context+ It
is also, as Sheen ~2004! pointed out, a matter of their orientation to the
interaction—whether they are functioning as learners, who treat language as
an object to be studied, or as language users, who treat language as a tool for
communication+ The general question of the learner’s orientation is considered in a later section+
Leeman ~2003! designed a study to investigate whether recasts work for
acquisition as positive or as negative evidence+ She compared the learning
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 585
that resulted from three treatments: ~a! recasts, ~b! negative evidence ~i+e+,
indicating the source of a problem but without correction!, and ~c! enhanced
salience ~i+e+, using stress and intonation to make the target form salient!+ The
recasts in this study were designed to provide only implicit negative evidence
about noun-adjective gender agreement ~e+g+, una taza roja “a cup red-FEM”!+
Each recast consisted of a comprehension signal, a targetlike reformulation of
the erroneous element of the learner’s utterance without any emphasis, and
an immediate topic continuation move, as in ~10!+ Such recasts can claim to
be implicit on the grounds that they do not include any of the explicit linguistic signals discussed previously+
~10! L: En la mesa hay una taza rojo+
“On the table there is a red-MASC cup+”
R: Um hmmm, una taza roja. Que mas?
“Um hmmmm, a red-FEM cup+ What else?” ~p+ 49!
Leeman found that only the recast and enhanced salience groups outperformed the control group on the posttests; that is, no benefit was found for
simply indicating that an error had been committed+ Furthermore, the recasts
and input with enhanced salience had very similar effects+ Leeman concluded
that recasts facilitate acquisition because they provide positive evidence, not
because they constitute negative evidence+
However, we cannot conclude from Leeman’s ~2003! study that all recasts work for acquisition because they afford positive evidence+ Leeman
designed her recasts so that the corrective force of the recasts was hidden+
It is possible that if the recasts had been more explicitly corrective, they
would have constituted negative evidence and resulted in greater acquisition than the enhanced input+ As we will see, other studies ~e+g+, Carroll &
Swain, 1993! found that explicit forms of negative feedback led to greater acquisition than implicit forms+ Thus, whereas Leeman’s study demonstrated that
recasts can assist acquisition simply by providing positive evidence, it certainly did not demonstrate that this is the only way or even the most efficient way to do so+
To sum up, the answer to the question of whether recasts supply positive
or negative evidence is that, depending on their characteristics, they can constitute positive evidence alone ~i+e+, their corrective force is not recognized
by the learner! or both positive and negative evidence+ Although there is evidence that recasts affording just positive evidence can facilitate acquisition,
it remains possible ~but not yet demonstrated! that recasts that supply both
positive and negative evidence are even more effective+
DO RECASTS FACILITATE ACQUISITION?
A number of researchers have queried whether recasts in general are an effective means of promoting acquisition+ The doubts stem from the problems
586 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
that learners are believed to face in identifying the corrective force of recasts ~i+e+, in viewing recasts as providing negative evidence!+ Given the multifunctional nature of recasts, learners are likely to have difficulty determining
how to respond to them+ Lyster ~1998b! argued that the acquisitional value
of recasts is diminished by the fact that recasts are inherently ambiguous,
such that their reformulating, corrective function is not transparent+ The
problem is made worse by the fact that interlocutors also repeat learners’
correct utterances, so learners can never be sure whether their interlocutors are echoing what they have said as a way of supporting their conversational efforts or in order to provide them with negative evidence+ Han
~2002! noted that “recasts are among the least clear and direct forms of
negative feedback” ~p+ 550!+ Mackey et al+’s ~2000! study, referred to previously, provided evidence that learners do indeed often fail to perceive recasts as corrections, especially when morphosyntactical reformulations are
involved+
It should be noted, however, that the problem of identifying the corrective function of recasts does not negate their acquisitional potential+ First, as
Leeman’s ~2003! study showed, recasts that supply only positive evidence
can have a positive effect on acquisition+ Second, learners have been shown
to identify the corrective force of a fair number of recasts, including those
that address morphosyntax, and to notice the features that have been reformulated+ As a number of studies ~e+g+, Doughty & Varela, 1998; Han, 2002!
have shown, the ambiguity of recasts can be reduced by ensuring that they
focus on a single linguistic feature and that their corrective force is linguistically signaled by, for example, the use of emphatic stress on the target
item+ It might also be argued that the ambiguity of recasts is actually an
advantage, as learners clearly need to be able to not pay attention to
linguistic form at least some of the time in order to focus on message
content+ The multifunctional nature of recasts gives learners the choice
of whether to focus on their communicative or linguistic content+ Good
language learners focus on form and meaning, switching from one to the
other within the course of a single interaction ~Lennon, 1989!+ Recasts cater
to this+
Another factor that needs to be taken into account in evaluating the acquisitional worth of recasts is the literacy level of learners+ There is clear evidence that alphabetic literacy has an impact on the way in which adults
process oral language+ Reviewing research in cognitive psychology on this
issue, Tarone and Bigelow ~2005! concluded that adults lacking in alphabetic
literacy have difficulty in oral processing tasks that require an awareness of
linguistic segments+ The studies reviewed by Tarone and Bigelow controlled
for the impact of social and educational background; the key factor appears
to be literacy itself+ The question then arises whether this interferes with learners’ ability to notice and thereby learn from recasts, given that noticing presumes some degree of phonological analysis+ Bigelow, delMas, Hansen, and
Tarone ~in press! set out to examine this possibility by investigating how a
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 587
group of Somali ESL learners, who differed in terms of whether their literacy
level was moderate or low, responded to recasts of their erroneous questions
while performing communicative tasks+ They reported that the more literate
learners were better at recalling the recasts than the less literate learners+
The researchers concluded that “literacy may augment learners’ ability to visualize formal lexical representations in short term memory in processing negative corrective feedback+”
In general, recasts have been examined from an exclusively cognitive perspective ~i+e+, whether they constitute the kind of data on which the acquisitional mechanisms can operate!; the social and sociocognitive dimensions of
recasting have been neglected ~see Firth & Wagner, 1997, for a more general
critique of interactionist studies in SLA!+ In particular, there is a need to consider the orientation of the learner receiving the recasts+ Batstone ~2002!, for
example, argued that learners often find themselves between contexts; that
is, they are simultaneously in a learning context and a communicative0social
context+ The former encourages an orientation to language as an object and,
thus, is likely to lead to awareness that the recast is corrective and to noticing of the corrected form; the latter encourages an orientation to language as
message by treating language as a tool for achieving communication+ In this
case, the learner might not become aware of the corrective force of a recast
and might be less likely to carry out the cognitive comparison hypothesized
to be important for learning+ Some studies ~e+g+, Nabei & Swain, 2002; Mackey
et al+, 2000! have attempted to establish what learners attend to in recasts,
but there has been an almost complete absence of research that has investigated attention to recasts in relation to learners’ general and shifting orientations to the discourse+
What all this is saying, however, is not that recasts cannot work for acquisition but, rather, that they do not always do so+ In this respect, they are almost
certainly no different from other types of speech act that characterize input
to learners+ The fact that recasts have been found to occur with such high
frequency in both naturalistic and classroom settings in comparison to other
corrective feedback strategies ~which is a direct outcome of their multifunctionality! ensures that they have acquisitional potential at least some of the
time+ Recasts are not necessary for acquisition; they are only facilitative when
they occur in supportive social contexts, and this is true only some of the
time, depending on the learner’s orientation+
There is now substantial evidence that exposing learners to a rich diet of
recasts can lead to acquisition+ Both short-term experimental studies ~e+g+,
Mackey & Philp, 1998; Ortega & Long, 1997! and longitudinal studies ~e+g+, Han,
2002; Ishida, 2004! have demonstrated that recasts, especially when they are
directed in a concentrated fashion at a specific grammatical structure, promote acquisition+ However, as Nicholas et al+’s ~2001! review showed, recasts
do not always work+ Thus, the key question is not whether recasts facilitate
acquisition but, rather, when and, even more crucially, how recasts work for
acquisition+
588 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
WHAT FACTORS INFLUENCE WHETHER RECASTS
ARE FACILITATIVE?
Recasts and Uptake
As a way of beginning to answer this question, another controversial issue—
the significance of uptake and its role in acquisition—must be examined+
For the purposes of their study of corrective feedback in an immersion context, Lyster and Ranta ~1997! defined uptake as “a student utterance that immediately follows the teacher’s feedback and that constitutes a reaction in
some way to the teacher’s intention to draw attention to some aspect of
the student’s initial utterance” ~p+ 48!+ Uptake can constitute repair ~i+e+,
the uptake move corrects the initial error! or be characterized as needs
repair ~i+e+, the uptake move does not correct the initial error!+ Controversy
centers on whether the learner’s uptake does or does not contribute to
acquisition+
A number of studies that investigated recasts ~e+g+, Braidi, 2002; Ellis
et al+, 2001; Loewen, 2005; Loewen & Philp, in press; Lyster, 1998a; Lyster
& Ranta, 1997; Oliver, 2000; Panova & Lyster, 2002; Sheen, 2004, 2006!
also examined the extent to which learners respond to recasts and, more
interestingly, the extent to which they repair the errors in their initial utterances by incorporating the correct forms from the recasts+ Corrective
episodes ~3!, ~7!, and ~8! are examples of uptake with repair+ Episodes ~1!,
~2!, ~4!, ~5!, and ~6! either contain no uptake move or uptake in need of repair+
Sheen ~2004! showed that both uptake and repair have been demonstrated
to vary according to setting+ In her study, both uptake and repair were found
more likely to occur in contexts in which learners are more oriented to
language as an object ~such as adult EFL classes! than in contexts in which
the interlocutors are predominantly concerned with content ~such as immersion classrooms!+ One reason for this difference appears to be that in classrooms in which there is a strong focus on message content, teachers often
do not allow time for students to uptake their recasts, preferring, instead, to
continue with topic development+ Learner uptake of feedback is also more
likely in a teacher-fronted lesson than in a pairwork situation ~Oliver!+ Oliver
suggested that this was because many of the recasts in the pairwork situation consisted of confirmation requests for which the appropriate response
was simply yes or no+ Thus, the extent to which uptake with repair occurs
depends to a large extent on the instructional or social context of the
interaction+
Researchers agree that although uptake with repair provides evidence that
learners have noticed the reformulated forms and are able to deploy them, it
cannot be used as evidence of acquisition+ However, they disagree on two
points: ~a! whether noticing can be said to have occurred only if uptake with
repair is present and ~b! whether deployment of the correct forms contributes to their acquisition+
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 589
Repair serves as an indicator of learner noticing+ If learners correct their
original errors by incorporating the target forms from recasts, then they must
have noticed these forms at some level+ However, failure to repair the original errors cannot be taken as evidence of a failure to notice the target forms+
Indeed, as Ohta’s ~2000! study of Japanese foreign language classrooms
showed, learners’ responses to recasts often take the form of private rather
than social speech, nor does repair signal that a learner has identified the
corrective function of a recast, as echoing the interlocutor’s recast might simply constitute an acknowledgment of the propositional veracity of the interlocutor’s statement—a reply designed to keep the channel of communication
open+ It follows, then, that the fact that recasts result in fairly low levels of
repair in at least some learning contexts ~Lyster & Ranta, 1997; Panova &
Lyster, 2002! cannot be used as an argument against the acquisitional potential of recasts+
The key question, however, is whether repair constitutes an acquisitional
mechanism+ More specifically, does repair itself facilitate acquisition? There
are theoretical arguments both for and against this proposition+ Swain’s ~1995!
output hypothesis claims that output serves as a means by which learners
can develop greater metalinguistic awareness and fill in gaps in their interlanguage+ N+ Ellis ~1996! suggested that practice serves as one of the ways in
which patterns are entrenched in learners’ L2 systems; uptake as repair can
be seen as a kind of contextualized practice+ However, it can also be argued
that what is important for acquisition is the input available from the recasts
rather than the output that may or may not occur in the learner’s response
to the recasts+ An input-driven view of the acquisition process views output
only as a means of increasing control over knowledge derived initially from
input+ According to this view, the acquisition of new linguistic forms is entirely
dependent on input+
Ultimately, whether uptake facilitates acquisition must be determined empirically+ It is unfortunate that, to date, there have been very few studies that
have examined this issue+ Mackey and Philp ~1998! reported that successful
uptake ~i+e+, repair! was not a significant factor in acquisition+ Loewen and
Philp ~in press! found that successful uptake correlated with success in posttests, but only when the feedback consisted of elicitation or metalinguistic
information+ Uptake following recasts was not significantly related to success
in their posttests+ However, Nabei and Swain ~2002! showed that the learner
they investigated was more likely to be successful in posttests with items that
she had uptaken from recasts+ Given the limited amount of research that has
investigated the relationship between uptake and acquisition, it is not yet possible to conclude whether it is the recasts alone or recasts  repair that is
more effective+
There is a greater certainty regarding the impact of a number of other
factors on the capacity of recasts to facilitate acquisition+ These factors
relate to the learner, the linguistic target of the recasts, and the type of
recast+
590 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
Learner Factors
As with all types of form-focused instruction, the key learner factor is developmental readiness—that is, the extent to which individual learners have
reached a stage of development that will enable them to incorporate the target forms addressed in the recasts into their interlanguage+ The notion of developmental readiness derives from early work in SLA, which showed that learners
follow a relatively fixed, universal order of acquisition and manifest clear developmental sequences in the acquisition of specific structures ~see R+ Ellis, 1994,
chap+ 3!+ Thus, if the recasts target features that a learner is developmentally
primed to acquire, potentially those recasts will be effective; if the recasts
target features that lie too far beyond the learner’s current stage of development, they are likely to fail+ Mackey and Philp ~1998! provided convincing evidence that this is the case, at least for question forms+ Nicholas et al+ ~2001!
suggested 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, however, is to stake a claim for recasts
increasing control over existing knowledge rather than triggering new knowledge and, as such, stands in contrast to the claim that the real value of recasts
lies in their promotion of new knowledge+ Thus, what is needed is research
that investigates the acquisition of features that learners have not yet begun
to acquire+ Such research is currently lacking, as studies to date have examined features that learners have already partially acquired+
It is important to distinguish the theoretical question of recasts in relation
to developmental readiness from the practical question of how interlocutors
~in particular, teachers! can ensure that the recasts that they provide are developmentally appropriate+ Interlocutors ~especially teachers in large classes! are
not in a position to determine learners’ stages of development, nor will they
know with any precision whether learners are “in a position to choose between
linguistic alternatives” ~Nicholas et al+, 2001, p+ 752!+ This only matters, however, if the recasts are of the focused kind ~i+e+, directed intensively at some
preselected linguistic feature!+ If the recasts are incidental and extensive ~i+e+,
directed at whatever errors learners happen to make!, this is not a problem+
True, some recasts might miss their mark, but others will score a bull’s-eye+
Loewen and Philp ~in press! reported that 50% of the recasts provided were
usable by the classroom learners they investigated+ Also, there are many linguistic items ~lexical and grammatical! that are not subject to the constraints
of developmental readiness+ In short, developmental readiness should not be
seen as a serious threat to the efficacy of recasts in contexts in which recasts
are plentiful and extensive+
5
It is also possible that other individual learner difference factors such
as language aptitude, personality, general motivation, and attitudes toward
correction will influence learners’ receptivity to corrective feedback and,
hence, its effectiveness+ To date, no study has examined the moderating
effects of these individual difference variables on the acquisitional worth of
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 591
recasts, but two studies have examined them for corrective feedback in general+ DeKeyser ~1993! found that learners who had low anxiety and low extrinsic motivation benefited from teaching that included regular error correction,
whereas learners with high extrinsic motivation improved more when the
teaching was devoid of it+ Havranek and Cesnik ~2001! reported that what
they called ideal learners ~i+e+, advanced learners who were only slightly irritated and not really embarrassed by correction, who reported finding correction important, who found speaking English easy and enjoyable, and who had
high verbal intelligence and strong motivation! benefited most from corrective feedback+ However, such learners might be expected to benefit from any
kind of instruction, with or without corrective feedback+ There is an obvious
need to examine more closely how individual learners react to and benefit
from corrective feedback ~but see Sheen, in press!+
Choice of Linguistic Target
One explanation for some of the mixed findings of the recast research is that
recasts are differentially effective depending on the linguistic target+ Ortega
and Long ~1997! found that recasts aided learners’ adverb placement but not
their use of clitic pronouns+ Havranek and Cesnik ~2001! reported that corrective feedback ~which included large numbers of recasts! had a greater effect
on verb inflections and rule-governed auxiliary use than on prepositions and
tense choice+ Leeman ~2003! reported that learners benefited to a greater extent
in Spanish number agreement than in gender agreement+ Iwashita ~2003! found
that recasts predicted posttest scores for one Japanese structure ~the te- verb
form! but not for another ~initial locative constructions!+ Ishida ~2004! reported
that the correct resultative use of the -te i (ru) structure in Japanese increased
to a greater extent than the progressive use of the same structure after a diet
of focused recasts+
It is possible that these mixed findings are related to the learners’ developmental readiness ~i+e+, they were more ready to acquire some features than others!, but this does not appear to be entirely the case @e+g+, acquisition of the
progressive use of the -te i (ru) structure typically precedes acquisition of the
resultative use#+ It might also have to do with the salience of the different structures in the recasts+ Structures that are salient might be more easily noticed
and, hence, acquired+ Salience, however, remains a difficult construct to operationalize ~but see Goldschneider & DeKeyser, 2005!+ Thus, the mixed results
await a convincing explanation+ Again, though, this is more of a theoretical than
a practical problem if the linguistic environment is one in which recasts are
incidental and extensive rather than planned and intensive+
Different Types of Recasts
What are the characteristics of those recasts that work best for acquisition?
One general finding is that recasts are more effective when they are intensive
592 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
~i+e+, focused repeatedly on the same linguistic feature! and when the target
features are enhanced in some way ~e+g+, by means of emphatic stress!+ Doughty
and Varela’s ~1998! and Han’s ~2002! studies testified to this+ This is tantamount to saying that recasts work well when they become a technique for
delivering planned form-focused instruction+ However, the same can be said
of many other techniques—in particular, the provision of explicit instruction
~Norris & Ortega, 2000!+ Of greater interest are those characteristics of incidental and extensive recasts that promote acquisition+ Such recasts constitute what is natural and normal for most language learners+ Understandably,
given that these cannot be investigated experimentally but, rather, require careful analysis of data collected naturalistically, there have been few studies that
have investigated recasts in this way to date+
A few studies have examined the relationship between different types of
recast and uptake with repair+ Sheen ~2006! found that mode ~i+e+, whether the
recast was declarative or interrogative in form!, linguistic focus ~i+e+, whether
the recast targeted phonological, lexical, or grammatical features!, and type
of change ~i+e+, whether the change involved substituting an item in the learner
utterance or some other kind of change! influenced repair+ Repair was more
likely to occur if the recast was declarative, was directed at pronunciation
and lexis rather than grammar, and involved substitution+ Philp ~2003! examined learners’ ability to recall recasts immediately after hearing them+ She found
that short recasts were recalled better than long recasts, especially by less
proficient learners, and recasts with just one or two changes were recalled
more accurately by all learners, irrespective of proficiency+ These studies, then,
indicate which characteristics of recasts are more likely to promote noticing
of the targeted features+
Only one study to date investigated the relationship between different types
of recasts and acquisition+ Loewen and Philp ~in press! investigated the relationship between recast characteristics and scores on tailor-made posttests
completed by individual learners+ The characteristics that they examined were
linguistic focus, length of recast, segmentation ~i+e+, whether the recast repeated
all or just part of the learner’s utterance!, number of changes, and complexity
~i+e+, whether the corrective episodes were simple or complex, involving several turns!+ Of these, only the feature concerning the number of changes predicted test scores: If the recast made only a single change, the learners were
more likely to get the right answer when tested+
To sum up, whereas there is clear evidence that recasts can facilitate acquisition, we still do not really have a clear picture of when they will do so+ Learner
factors, the nature of the targeted features, and the characteristics of the
recasts help to determine, in complex ways, when recasts work for acquisition and when they do not+ If recasts are intensive, focused, and individualized ~as has been the case in laboratory studies!, they are likely to be effective;
however, so are other form-focused techniques+ Of interest, then, is not just
whether recasts facilitate acquisition but whether they do so more efficiently
than other techniques, a question addressed in the next section+ Researchers
have begun to investigate the characteristics of extensive recasts ~of the kind
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 593
found in immersion and language classrooms! that predict uptake with repair,
but the relationship between uptake and acquisition remains uncertain and
controversial+ Currently, little is known about which characteristics of extensive recasts are important for acquisition+
ARE RECASTS MORE EFFECTIVE THAN OTHER
FORM-FOCUSED TECHNIQUES?
Comparisons between recasts and other form-focused techniques have examined the relative effectiveness of recasts in relation to ~a! models and ~b! other
corrective feedback strategies+ These studies have been motivated by both
theoretical considerations ~in particular, the contributions of positive and negative evidence in the acquisition of a L2! and practical issues ~i+e+, what kind
of form-focused instruction to recommend to teachers!+
Models have typically been operationalized as statements or instructions
that learners are asked to listen to and then repeat+ To provide a communicative context for such models, Long et al+ ~1998! asked learners to listen to
instructions relating to the positioning of dolls in a drawing of a room and
then to relay these instructions to the researcher, who placed the dolls as
directed+ Long et al+ pointed out that such models differed from recasts in
two crucial respects: ~a! whether the utterance containing the grammatical
information preceded the learners’ own utterances ~models! or followed them
~recasts! and ~b! whether the learners owned the content of their utterances
~as was the case with the utterances that triggered the recasts! or not ~as was
the case with the models that they just copied!+ For experimental purposes, it
is clearly necessary to contrive a context in which learners repeat the models
that they hear in order to control for output ~as learners must necessarily
engage in output to elicit recasts!+ However, models operationalized in this
way constitute a somewhat unusual discourse move, as there are few communicative contexts that require learners to relay instructions that they hear from
one person to another+ It is also possible that requiring the learners to repeat
the propositional content of the models might have interfered with their ability to attend closely to the grammatical forms that encoded them+ No such
need exists with recasts+
The results of research that compared the effects of models and recasts
on acquisition are very mixed+ For the four grammatical structures that Long
et al+ ~1998! investigated, models resulted in higher gain scores on one structure, recasts on one structure, and there was no difference for the other two+
However, the only statistically significant difference ~for adverb placement in
Spanish! was in favor of recasts+ In contrast, Ayoun ~2004! found no difference between groups receiving models or recasts, but reported that a group
receiving traditional grammar instruction outperformed both+ Leeman’s ~2003!
study, mentioned previously, found no difference in the posttest scores of
learners exposed to models or recasts+ In this study, models were operationalized somewhat differently because the participants only heard the models
594 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
~they were not asked to repeat them! and the grammatical target was enhanced
suprasegmentally+
A conservative reading of the research completed to date would be that
models and recasts are equally effective ~or equally ineffective, in comparison to explicit grammar instruction!+ Some degree of skepticism regarding studies that seek to compare generic recasts and models is also warranted+ As
emphasized previously, recasts are enormously varied, with evidence increasingly indicating that some types might be more facilitative than others+ The
same is almost certainly true of models+ Ayoun ~2004! noted that it was difficult to distinguish qualitatively between recasts and models in her study+ Ultimately, what probably matters is not whether the data that learners have to
work with occur before or after they speak, but the extent to which ~a! the
targeted forms are salient and ~b! the learners are motivated to attend to them+
Other studies examined the relative effects of recasts and other types of
corrective feedback on acquisition+ The results of these studies are much
clearer+ In general, recasts do not work as well as feedback that elicits output
from learners ~see Havranek & Cesnik, 2001; Lyster, 2004! or feedback that
provides explicit metalinguistic information ~see Carroll & Swain, 1993!+ Feedback that leads to learner output—variably referred to as negotiation of form
and prompts in the literature ~see Lyster; Lyster & Ranta, 1997!—includes such
strategies as clarification requests and elicitation+ Whereas recasts provide
the learner with data on target language forms, prompts elicit use of them
by the learner+ Comparing recasts and prompts serves as a way of addressing
the relative contributions of focused input and pushed output ~Swain, 1995!
to acquisition+ Studies that compared recasts with explicit correction, metalinguistic feedback, or both ~e+g+, Carroll & Swain, 1993; R+ Ellis, Loewen, &
Erlam, 2006! were motivated by the desire to examine the relative effects of
implicit and explicit feedback on acquisition+
It is, of course, possible to find theoretical arguments to refute the demonstrated benefits of prompts and explicit feedback+ Prompts do not supply
learners with new linguistic knowledge; they merely activate ~proceduralize!
target forms that have already been partially acquired+ In contrast, recasts
supply learners with data on new as well as old forms while, if repair takes
place, affording opportunities for pushed output+ Explicit feedback might only
appear to be more effective than implicit feedback in that it serves to develop
learned linguistic knowledge but not true competence+ Doughty ~2001! argued
that recasts are ideal because they facilitate cognitive comparison of interlanguage and target forms in a communicative context and, thus, influence
learners’ competence+ Both of these arguments are convincing in making the
case for recasts+ However, they do not necessarily constitute arguments for
rejecting prompts and explicit feedback+ If prompts help learners to proceduralize and thereby restructure their existing knowledge, they clearly serve
a valuable purpose+ Explicit feedback might be considered of no value for
acquisition only if ~a! it can be demonstrated that it contributes to explicit
knowledge but not implicit knowledge and ~b! it can be argued convincingly
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 595
that explicit knowledge plays no role ~immediate or delayed! in the development of learners’ competence+ In fact, strong arguments have been advanced
for claiming that learners’ explicit knowledge assists the development of
implicit knowledge ~N+ Ellis, 2005; R+ Ellis, 1994!, and a recent study by R+ Ellis
et al+ ~2006! provided evidence that explicit feedback in the form of metalinguistic explanation had a delayed effect on the acquisition of implicit knowledge of English past tense -ed+ No such effect was found for recasts in this study+
To sum up, there is, as yet, no conclusive evidence that recasts are more
effective than models, and there is some evidence to show that they are less
effective than explicit types of corrective feedback and prompts, even when
the measure of acquisition taps implicit knowledge+ However, it remains possible that recasts will prove more effective in promoting acquisition of new
linguistic features, although this remains to be demonstrated empirically, as
the majority of existing studies examined features of which the learners already
had partial knowledge+
CONCLUSION
Our knowledge about recasts and their role in the acquisition process is developing and will continue to grow+ There are, however, a number of difficulties
that researchers face in investigating recasts+ The main purpose of this article has been to problematize research on recasts by identifying the difficulties+ These include the following:
1+ Recasts do not constitute a homogeneous construct; they exist in many
different forms+ As Nicholas et al+ ~2001! pointed out, researchers have
differed in how they operationalized recasts, making it difficult to compare results across studies+ There is sufficient evidence now available
to show that it is not appropriate to treat recasts as an undifferentiated
genus+
2+ Recasts are also functionally different; they can serve both communicative and didactic functions+ However, distinguishing recasts that negotiate meaning from those that negotiate form is difficult because there
are no obvious formal signals that indicate what kind of negotiation is
taking place; nor is there any empirical evidence that this distinction is
significant for acquisition+
3+ Recasts have been considered a type of implicit corrective feedback+
However, many recasts make the corrective force quite transparent+ It
is not difficult to find examples of recasts that are just as explicit as
so-called explicit correction+
4+ It is not possible to say with any certainty whether recasts constitute a
source of negative evidence ~as is often assumed! or afford only positive evidence, as this will depend on the learner’s orientation to the interaction+ If learners treat language as an object to be studied, then they
might detect the corrective force of recasts and thus derive negative evidence from them+ However, if they act as language users and treat lan596 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen
guage as a tool, then they are less likely to see recasts as corrective and
so will derive only positive evidence from them+
5+ Learners might experience difficulty in perceiving the corrective force
of recasts because recasts are multifunctional+ However, whether this
is important for acquisition remains to be shown+
6+ Learners can adopt either a learner orientation or a communicative orientation to recasts, which might influence how they interpret them and
to what they attend+ Differences in learners’ orientation might account
for the different frequency of recasts and uptake found in different
instructional contexts+
7+ Recasts have been viewed almost exclusively in terms of their linguistic and cognitive impact on acquisition+ However, recasts do not occur
in a social vacuum, and their efficacy might be influenced by sociopsychological factors that determine learners’ receptivity to them+
8+ The role of uptake ~including repair! remains uncertain+ Repair constitutes an indicator of noticing, but noticing can also take place without
uptake+ Lyster ~1998a! suggested that recasts have limited acquisitional
value because they result in low levels of uptake with repair+ Such a
claim is justified if it can be shown that learner repair is related to acquisition+ There is, in fact, some evidence that this is the case ~Loewen,
2005; Williams, 2001!+
9+ There is some evidence to show that learner factors ~e+g+, learner
readiness and literacy level!, the linguistic target of the recasts ~e+g+,
morphosyntax as opposed to vocabulary or pronunciation!, and the
characteristics of the recasts themselves ~e+g+, the type and number of
changes made in the recast! influence whether recasts result in uptake
with repair or facilitate acquisition+ Nevertheless, we are a long way from
understanding how these various factors interact+ Thus, although we
know that recasts can facilitate acquisition, we do not know when they
will+
10+ The claim that recasts are most effective when they are focused and
intensive ~i+e+, directed repeatedly at a single linguistic feature! is of little practical significance for teachers because they are not in a position
to know whether their learners are developmentally ready or whether
the targeted feature is one amenable to treatment through recasts+ Incidental, extensive recasts directed at whatever errors learners happen
to make might be of greater practical value+
11+ Related to the previous point, care must be taken not to extrapolate
from laboratory studies of recasts, which typically examine focused,
intensive recasts, to classroom situations, in which recasts are typically of the extensive type+
12+ Despite the strong theoretical claims regarding the acquisitional potential of recasts, there is no clear evidence that recasts work better for
acquisition than other aspects of interaction such as models, prompts,
or explicit corrective strategies+ Indeed, there is some evidence that the
last two of these are more effective than recasts+
Recasts in Second Language Acquisition 597
Finally, it would be wise to bear in mind that recasts are just one flower
among many and, to extend this metaphor, that they are a very varied species
of flora+ Much might be gained by engaging in a careful, qualitative analysis of
recasts ~e+g+, using conversational analysis as in Hauser, 2005! in order to tease
out the variations and the contextual constraints that give rise to them+
~Received 3 February 2006!
NOTES
1+ All examples of recasts in this article, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the Korea
EFL database used in Sheen ~2004!+
2+ Recasts are not invariably frequent+ Nabei and Swain ~2002! reported that there were only 25
teacher error-treatment episodes ~of which 23 involved recasts! in 420 min of recording time+ The
explanation given for this low level of corrective feedback was that the teacher was primarily oriented to meaning and that she was very familiar with Japanese students+
3+ Hauser ~2005! raised a different objection regarding the way recasts have been defined and
coded+ He pointed out that definitions such as Long’s ~1996! make reference to recasts that maintain the meaning of the learner’s initial utterance+ He suggested this is problematic because meaning, whether viewed as propositional content or action, is not established by the learner’s initial
utterance but, rather, is “open to negotiation” and “emerges through the interaction” ~p+ 310!; he
also illustrated how this takes place+ He concluded that coding practices based on the idea of maintaining meaning “obscure what is happening in the interaction” ~p+ 310!+ However, Lyster and Ranta’s ~1997! and Braidi’s ~2002! definitions make no mention of meaning; they are based on purely
formal criteria, namely that a recast ~a! reformulates and ~b! corrects a preceding learner utterance+
Thus, Hauser’s critique of the coding practices of recast studies seems misplaced+
4+ An anonymous SSLA reviewer pointed out that what is crucial is the focus of the interlocutor
receiving the recast, rather than the provider+ Thus, whether the recast is communicative or didactic in purpose matters less than how the learner orientates to the recast+ We would agree, and we
address the whole question of orientation later in the article+ One of the problems with definitions
of recasts such as Long’s ~1996, 2006! is that they do not take account of the participants’
orientation—or of the very distinct possibility that the orientations of the provider and receiver of
the recast might not match+
5+ However, developmental readiness is a potential threat to experimental studies of recasts that
target specific grammatical structures+ Clearly, researchers planning such studies need to establish
that the target structure lies within the learners’ acquisitional capacity+
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APPENDIX
TRANSCRIPTION KEY
Symbol and Meaning
L Learner
T Teacher
R Researcher
~ ! Extra information
Bold Emphasis
600 Rod Ellis and Younghee Sheen

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