Prompts and recasts: Differential effects on second language morphosyntax

Abstract

The merits of recasts have been widely debated and investigated in and out of the language classroom. This quasi-experimental study examines the impact of recasts in comparison to prompts and no corrective feedback on francophone learners' acquisition of English third person possessive determiners. Sixty-four students from three intact intensive English as a second language classes carried out 11 communicative activities during which they received corrective feedback according to the condition they were assigned to. An oral picture-description task and a computerized fill-in-the-blank task that kept record of participants' latency to retrieve the correct forms were administered prior to the treatment and immediately after it ended. Four weeks later the oral picture description task was readministered. Analyses of individual participants' oral data revealed that prompts were more effective than recasts and no corrective feedback in helping learners move up to more advanced stages of a developmental possessive determiner scale. This was especially apparent for low-proficiency learners. Data from the computerized task showed that prompts allowed learners to retrieve possessive determiner knowledge faster than recasts.