The document summarizes a study that compared the effects of recast and prompt feedback on the acquisition of relative clauses by Iranian English language learners. 45 intermediate students were assigned to recast, prompt, or control groups. Those in the recast group received recasts, those in the prompt group received elicitation prompts, and the control group received no feedback. Results of grammaticality post-tests showed that the prompt group performed significantly better than both the recast and control groups. This suggests that prompt feedback was more effective for helping learners acquire relative clauses than recast feedback.

1.  International Conference on Current
Trends in ELT: Putting the Learner in the
Spotlight
 Urmia, Iran
 May, 20-22, 2013
 Manoochehr Jafarigohar
 Abdullah Gharbavi
 Payame Noor University

2.  The purpose of the present study is to
explore how providing recast and prompt
would promote the acquisition of
grammatical development in EFL
context. To be more precise, how these
two types of feedback can influence the
acquisition of relative clauses in Iranian
learners of English.

3.  2.1 Do recast and prompt have different effects
on the grammatical development of Iranian
learners of English?
 2.2 In multiple comparisons of the recast,
prompt and control group, which groups are
significantly different from one another?
 3.3 Which one is more facilitative to L2
grammar development, recast or prompt in the
form of elicitation?

4.  The teacher supplies the correct form and
clearly indicates that what the student
said was incorrect, the example below is
from Brown (2007, p. 278).
 Student: when I have 12 years old
 Teacher: no not have. That's wrong. You
mean, "When I was 12 years old…"

5.  utterance that rephrases an utterance 'by
changing one or more of its sentence
components (subject, verb, or object)
while still referring to its central
meaning'(Long, 1996, p. 436).
 S: I go to cinema last weekend.
 T: You went to cinema. What did you see?
 S: 'Gladiators'. It was great.

6. The teacher uses a variety of
signals rather than explicit
correction or reformulating the
student's sentence. These signals
or cues prompt the student to self-
repair or self-correction (Lyster,
2002; 2004)

7.  Table 1 Types of Prompt (Lyster & Mori, 2006, p. 272)
 Types of prompt Speaker Student utterance + teacher prompt
 (a) Elicitation Student (to another student) What color you
like?
Teacher Uh, Reza, how do we say that in
What color do…?
Student What color do you like?
 (b) Metalinguistic cues Student I see Ali last week
 Teacher Good, but remember you are talking
 About past event
 (c) Clarification request Student I want go today, today
 Teacher Pardon, I didn't get exactly what
you said.
 (d) Repetition Student I wanted see him.
Teacher I wanted to see him

8.  Research on feedback rests on
interaction hypothesis. The interaction
approach accounts for learning
through input (exposure to language),
production of language (output), and
feedback that comes as a result of
interaction

9.  Lyster & Ranta, 1997
 Lyster, 1998a
 Lyster, 1998b
 Lyster, 2002
 Lyster, 2004
 Lyster & Mori, 2006
 Long & Inagaki, 1998

10.  Long, 2007
 Mackey, Gass &McDonough, 2000
 MacDonough, 2005
 Mackey & Oliver, 2002
 Ellis, Basturkmem & Loewen, 2001
 Ellis,Tanaka & Yamazaki, 1994
 Nassaji, 2007
 Sheen, 2004

11.  45 volunteer intermediate students -
Ahwaz.
 Their native language Farsi or
Arabic
 To ensure homogeneity between
 Proficiency test was administered –
population of 60
 And then 45 –assigned into 3
groups: recast, prompt and control

12.  Research design is experimental
 Wanted to test the effectiveness of
recast and prompt
 In treatment (I), we used prompt
 In treatment (II), we used recast
 In control group no treatment
 At the end of the sixth- a post test-all
of the groups

13.  The subjects in the treatment groups were asked to
perform various picture description tasks which
were of focused type (Ellis, 2003). The tasks
purposefully elicited the relative clauses.
 The subjects- imagine-they were on phone
 Also- imagine- in lost and found office of an
airport
 In prompt group, - prompting signals and cues
 In recast group- provided the subjects with recast

14.  In addition to treatment tasks,
testing instruments were also
utilized. Two pen-and-paper tests
were constructed for the pretest
and posttest. One was a
grammatical judgment test and the
other was a metalinguistic
knowledge test.

15.  Table 1 Descriptive statistics of prompt, recast and control group
present posttest
 Group N M SD M SD
 Prompt 15 12.47 3.159 18.87 1.125
 Recast 15 12.53 2.825 14.93 1.907
 Control 15 11.93 2.549 14.20 2.651
 Mean scores improve from pretest to the posttests
For both recast and prompt group

16. Table 2. ANOVA for test scores on posttest
Sum of
squares
Df Mean
square
F Sig
Between
groups
188.933 2 94.4 23.749 .000
Within
groups 167.067 42 3.978
Total 356.000 44

17.  As can be seen from Table 2, the
ANOVA performed on the posttest
scores of the groups revealed
significant differences among groups,
F (2, 42) = 23.749, p < .05. This
result suggests that there is a
significant difference somewhere
among the groups

18. MEAN
DIFFERENT
STD.ERROR Sig
Prompt Prompt
Control
3.993*
4.667*
.728
.728
.000
.000
Recast Recast
Control
-3.933*
.733
.728
.728
.000
.577
Control Recast
Prompt
-4.667*
-733*
.728
.728
.000
.577

19. Looking at Table 3, you can
clearly see that the pair groups
that are significantly different
from one another at the p<.05
level.

20.  Research question 1
 'Do recast and prompt have different effects on
the grammatical development of Iranian
learners of English?'
 As can be seen from Table 2 in the previous
section, the ANOVA performed on the posttest
scores of the groups revealed significant
differences among groups, F (2, 42) = 23.749,
p < .05. Therefore, the answer to the first
question was affirmative.

21.  Research question 2
 'In multiple comparisons of the recast, prompt and
control group, which groups are significantly different
from one another?'
 As can be seen from Table 3, recast and prompt
groups differ significantly in terms of their
grammatical gains(P<.05). Also, prompt and control
groups differ significantly at the p<.05 level. In
contrast, there were no differences between the recast
and control groups. This suggests that the treatment in
prompt group was more effective than those of recast
and control groups. This could be ascribed to the
different corrective force of prompt and recast.

22.  'Which one is more facilitative to L2 grammar
development, recast or prompt in the form of
elicitation?'
 Since the outcome of Tukey test (see Table 3)
revealed that recast and control groups are
significantly different and recast and control groups
are not significantly different. Therefore, we can
conclude that prompt is more effective than recast at
the .05 level of significance. In addition to Tukey
results, the results of Table 1 shows that the
improvement of prompt group from pretest to posttest
is substantially far more than that of recast group.

23.  prompt was more effective than recast -
grammar development.
 Thus, empirical support for the interaction
hypothesis
 The superiority of prompt over recat- implies a
beneficial role for negative evidence
 and implies that pedagogically, prompt is a
better choice for L2 teachers than recast in an
L2 classroom

24. agharbavi7777@gmail.com
gharbavi@pnu.ac.ir