STUDENTS’ PERCEPTIONS OF RECAST FOR THE CORRECTION OF ENGLISH VOWEL SOUNDS
Abstract
It is inevitable for learners to make errors in English learning. Accordingly, it is necessary for teachers, educators and researchers to have a deeper understanding of how to best utilize oral corrective feedback. Among the many types of corrective feedback, including recast, clarification request, meta-linguistic feedback, elicitation, repetition of error and interuptions, it is important for the teacher to appropriately decide which type is most appropriate for which language target taught in classroom. The authors have conducted a study investigating the students’ reflections on recasts provided by the teacher regarding English vowel errors during 10 hours of pronunciation lessons. Under the approach of mixed methodology, the research model includes qualitatively-led quantitative methods. In this article, the author only aims to answer one research question, that is “How and why do students respond to recasts that the teacher gives to their pronunciation errors?”. The results of the study reveal the full understanding and the postitive attitude of the students to the teacher’s use of recast. The students have given some reasons why they do not response to the recast, or how recast can not help them in improving their pronunciation. Some reasons are: the students can not hear the teacher’s pronouncing clearly; they can hear the teacher’s recast but it is hard for them to repeat correctly in the first time, even second time; and they need to listen many more times to practice the sounds. In addition, the students give some recommendations for teacher to give a better recast that teacher can remind students of errors whenever they make. Morever, one recast for a pronunciation error should be repeated no more than three times even when students can not pronounce correctly. In this case students can practice more and recast can be delivered in another situation. More details and description of the results can be found in the main article.
Key words: English language learning and teaching; Corrective Feedback; Recast, English vowel errors.
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