Recasts and Negotiated Prompts: How do Chinese L2 Learners Perceive Them?

Abstract

Two types of corrective feedback, recasts and prompts, have sparked much research in second language (L2) learning and teaching. However, it is still unclear how these two types of feedback draw learners’ attention to the erroneous forms in L2 classes. This study used an open questionnaire to investigate Chinese learners’ perceptions of recasts and negotiated prompts (i.e. clarification requests, elicitations and repetitions) for their English learning. The results show the majority of the comments about the two feedback types were positive, indicating the learners’ overall positive attitudes to error correction. Significantly, most of the comments on the two feedback types accord with scholarly opinions about their usage for L2 learning, such as being able to identify the error made after hearing what the teacher said in the recast. Another example might be engaging in a thinking process on receiving a prompt. However, some of the comments provide new insights about how learners may use the two types of feedback for L2 learning, for example, having a deep impression/memory of what the teacher said in the recast and the difficulty in self-correcting their error following a negotiated prompt. These findings, in particular the new insights, confirm Swain’s (2000) argument that research needs to test scholarly assumptions about pedagogical tasks or devices.

Keywords

Recasts negotiated prompts corrective feedback learner perceptions L2 learning

Introduction

In communication-oriented L2 lessons, recasts and prompts have been the most frequently provided corrective feedback in conversation interactions (e.g. Brown, 2016; Ellis et al., 2001; Iwashita and Li, 2012; Loewen and Philp, 2006; Lyster and Ranta, 1997). This frequent provision of the two oral feedback types has encouraged experimental research that has investigated their effects on L2 learning. Results of the experimental research demonstrate a beneficial role of the feedback for L2 learning (Li, 2010; Lyster and Izquierdo, 2009), but at the same time, they show that multiple variables mediate the effectiveness of the feedback, especially for L2 learning in the classroom setting (e.g. Ammar and Spada, 2006; Gooch et al., 2017; Mifka-Profozic, 2013; van de Guchte et al., 2015; Yang and Lyster, 2010). The cognitive interactionist approach to second language acquisition (SLA) (Long, 1996; Swain, 2005) theorizes that the role of feedback in L2 learning is via the mechanism of learner attention to the problematic form produced. However, little research has directly investigated how L2 learners in a class, who possess a unique combination of variables, allocate their attention to recasts and prompts. As such, this study, which is supplementary to the primary study that investigated the efficacy of recasts and prompts in a university L2 classroom, reports on how the participating cohort of learners perceived the two types of feedback for their English learning. Its findings provide a triangulated view of the quantitative results of the primary study and offer an insight into how recasts and prompts could sometimes be used beyond scholarly assumptions.

Literature Review

Corrective feedback facilitates learning in communication-oriented L2 lessons according to the cognitive interactionist approach to SLA. The interactional hypothesis (Long, 1996; Long, 2007) states that recasts reformulate L2 learners’ partial or full non-target-like utterances with target-like models during the flow of conversation. Moreover, this method of correction primes learners to cognitively compare the erroneous and correct utterances in the context of meaning exchange, thereby encouraging form-function mapping to benefit implicit learning. Unlike recasts, prompts are in the form of clarification requests, repetitions, elicitations and metalinguistic clues (Lyster, 2004). Swain’s (1985; Swain, 1995; Swain, 2005) Output Hypothesis explains that output or modified output requested by prompts forces learners to notice gaps in their production, search for correct answers in their existing interlanguage system, test their hypotheses about language use and even talk about language forms. These functions that self-correction provides in L2 learning involve the learners processing language forms at a conscious level, which Lyster (2004) believes makes the correction process more informative for learners when they are attempting to fix their problematic forms.

Although there are different theoretical explanations, central to the role of recasts and prompts is that they draw learners’ attention to the problematic forms, thereby creating a necessary condition for learning (Gass, 1997). This attention-driven learning draws on Schmidt’s noticing hypothesis, which states that ‘people learn about the things that they attend to and do not learn much about the things they do not attend to’ (Schmidt’s, 2001: 30). Given that L2 learners’ attention is a limited-capacity system, Long (1996) claims that corrective feedback occurs at a moment when learners are clear about what they intend to say and can divert their attention to the problematic language form. Thus, according to Long, corrective feedback contains direct or indirect information that informs L2 learners of what is ungrammatical in their production and works as a type of negative evidence. Adding to Long’s explanation about the role of corrective feedback in SLA, some scholars (Ellis and Sheen, 2006; Nicholas et al., 2001) suggest that recasts contain models of language use and can work for L2 learning via the exemplars or positive evidence contained in the feedback.

While research (Loewen et al., 2009; Schulz, 2001) has reported L2 learners’ favourable attitude to error correction, interaction research has been exploring the mechanism of corrective feedback via learner attention (e.g. Carpenter et al., 2006; Egi, 2007; Egi, 2010; Mackey et al., 2000; Mackey, 2000; Kartchava and Ammar, 2014; Nabei and Swain, 2002; Philp, 2003; Rassaei and Moinzadeh, 2014). Several earlier studies (e.g. Mackey et al., 2000; Mackey, 2002) have explored the extent to which learners notice or perceive mixed types of interactional feedback as being corrective moves. Mackey et al.’s (2000) study involved 17 L2 learners participating in stimulated recall sessions where they recalled their thoughts when watching a video recording of their previous interactions. Retrospective comments on language forms were taken as evidence of learner ability to notice the feedback, such as: ‘I thought branch is not the proper word in this situation’ (Mackey et al., 2000: 481). Consequently, the study found that the learners did attend to non-target aspects of their language when the feedback addressed their phonological, lexical and even morpho-syntactic errors. Also using stimulated recall, Mackey (2002) further found that on receiving a prompt, the learners commented on being pushed to modify their non-target utterances.

Another critical issue that the above studies investigated was how noticeable recasts were for learners. For example, Egi (2007) invited 49 intermediate learners of Japanese in the USA to participate in communicative tasks with a native speaker. The participants received recasts that focussed on their non-target-like productions of the te-form verbs and numeral classifiers. The learners’ perceptions about recasts were measured by immediate reports (the learner was prompted by two knocking sounds to report his/her thoughts during a brief conversational turn) or stimulated recall. The findings showed learners perceived recasts differently, as providing either negative evidence, positive evidence, a combination of negative and positive evidence or content. When the recasts were long and very different from their problematic production, the learners likely perceived the feedback as responses to content. In contrast, when the recasts were short and similar to their problematic production, they likely perceived the feedback as responses to form. Adding to what Egi found, research has also found that L2 learners’ attention to the corrective function of recasts was affected by their developmental level of a linguistic form (Philp, 2003), the addressed linguistic target (Egi, 2007), the previous utterance on hearing a recast (Carpenter et al., 2006) or the production of modified output (Egi, 2010).

A few recent studies have explored whether learners are more likely to perceive one type of feedback than the other. In the study by Rassaei and Moinzadeh (2014), 30 Persian English as a foreign language (EFL) learners received either recast or metalinguistic feedback in task-based interactions that addressed their non-target-like production of articles and reported their retrospective thoughts through the stimulated recall sessions. The study found that learners noticed more than 50% of metalinguistic feedback in comparison to 33.6% of recasts. This high noticeability of metalinguistic feedback may be limited to articles as the target form, as articles are non-salient and difficult to notice (Nassagi, 2017). Similarly, Kartchava and Ammar (2014) examined how learner beliefs about the importance and effectiveness of feedback impacted on the noticeability of recasts, prompts and mixed feedback. The researchers found a positive association between learner beliefs and the noticeability of corrective feedback, especially for recasts.

To date, the interaction research has found some evidence to support the cognitive interactionist theoretical claim that corrective feedback draws learner attention to the problematic form, albeit with various constraints. However, many issues regarding the role of recasts and prompts remain uncertain. For example, there is a concern that recasts do not leave the learner with the same deep impression of the problematic form as prompts do, as recasts may only lead to a mere repetition of the target form contained in the feedback (Lyster and Saito, 2010). Concern also exists regarding whether prompts arouse a high level of anxiety in learners, which interferes with their cognitive process of allocating attention to the problematic form addressed by the feedback (Long, 1996; Long, 2007). Swain argues that ‘it seems essential in research to test what learners actually do, not what the researchers assume instructions and task demands will lead learners to focus on’ (Swain, 2000: 80, emphasis in original). Given the complexity of a classroom environment where a myriad of factors may distract or affect the learners’ attention (Li, 2010; McDonough, 2005), there is a need for experimental classroom research that investigates the effects of corrective feedback to provide data on learners’ perceptions of corrective feedback. This examination then offers insight into how the corrective feedback has worked for language learning in a particular classroom context. Unfortunately, few existing experimental classroom studies (e.g. Ammar and Spada, 2006; Gooch et al., 2017; Mifka-Profozic, 2013; van de Guchte et al., 2015; Yang and Lyster, 2010) have reported such data. Therefore, as a complement to the published main study (Li and Iwashita, 2019), this present study reports data on learners’ perceptions of corrective feedback in order to provide further insight into the results found.

Methodology

Participants

The research site for the main study and this subset study involved a provincial university located in central China. The university enrols around 6,000 students annually. The enrolees are likely to have similar academic levels, as the university selects students based on their scores from the National Matriculation Test. The enrolees are also likely to have similar English learning backgrounds because the vast majority come from the local province and the school curriculum across the province is decided by the provincial Education Commission.

The 200 participants in this study were volunteers from a pool of first-year students in the research site who came from a variety of disciplines (e.g. physics, chemistry and international trade). Of the 200 participants, 90 were from the main study and majored in physics, and the rest were from a variety of disciplines such as chemistry and international trade. They all had Mandarin as their first language and had studied English for six years at secondary school. At the university, the students needed to have a two-hour English lesson twice a week in their first two years. These lessons mostly focussed on vocabulary, grammar and reading, but there was occasional use of language tasks.

Procedure

As this study constitutes a subset study, an introduction to the main study is necessary. The main study was a quasi-experimental study that investigated the effects of recasts versus negotiated prompts (i.e. clarification requests, repetitions and elicitations) on learners’ acquisition of questions and past tense verbs. It took a pretest, treatment and posttest design and involved three groups for the treatment lessons (the recast group, the negotiated prompt group and the control group). Immediately after the main study was complete (i.e. after the delayed posttest, which occurred three weeks later following the treatment lessons and the immediate posttest), the episodes of the teacher providing recasts or negotiated prompts to a student in the experimental groups were cut from the video-recorded treatment lessons. The 200 participants of this study, including those from the main study, watched the video clips of the recast and negotiated prompt episodes in a language lab. They were then asked to respond to a questionnaire with one open-ended question (written in Chinese): How do/did you think the two types of corrective feedback may be useful for your English learning? The participants wrote their answers in Chinese without any time constraint.

A possible limitation of this design may be that the views on the two types of corrective feedback reported by those participants who did not take part in the experimental treatment lessons could have been influenced by the interactions in the video clips. However, a counter-argument could be made that the interactions in the video clips may have resonated with their experience of learning if they had taken part in the treatment lessons because the participants from the main study and the rest of the participants were from the same pool of first-year students at the research site. As mentioned earlier, the students in the first year at the research site had similar learning experiences and proficiency levels of English. Moreover, the participants from the main study and the rest of the participants made similar comments to the open question.

Interaction Data

Since this study was supplementary, it is necessary to briefly introduce the interaction treatment for providing recasts and negotiated prompts in the main study. For the treatment in the main study, a lesson was randomly selected to show the features of the interaction. Despite there being a similar number of feedback episodes provided to each of the experimental groups, the episodes of recasts and negotiated prompts had different features. Because the teacher was familiar with the language profile of the participants in the main study, it was relatively easy for the teacher to recast any non-target-like utterances. As such, there was one single feedback move in a vast majority of the recast episodes, and there was no additional stress or uptake in the delivery. In contrast, the negotiated prompt episodes usually involved multiple feedback moves, as most of the participants in the main study could not successfully repair their non-target-like utterances after the first prompt. With multiple prompts, there were multiple uptake opportunities and responses. It is also worth mentioning that the choice of which negotiated prompt was to be used was at the teacher’s discretion.

Analysis

Content analysis was used as the analytical technique for the open-ended question in the survey. Through this method, words, phrases or other units of text that have similar meaning or connotations were identified and labeled as ‘themes’. This qualitative content analysis provided information on what the participants were thinking. The number of mentions of the thematic units was counted and tabulated, which provided the quantitative aspect of the content analysis. Mini translation was employed to present the data, including the coded themes and their representative quotations.

Results

Learners’ Perceptions of Recasts

Eight themes were identified in the participants’ comments on recasts, and are presented in Table 1. The eight themes were numbered from the highest to the lowest number of mentions and frequencies. Seven themes were positive comments and accounted for the vast majority (98.04%). One theme (Theme 8) was negative and accounted for only 1.97% of total mentions.

Table 1.

A Summary of Themed Comments on Recasts.

Themes	Frequency of mention	Percentage (%)
A deep impression/memory	64	25.30
Need/listen to the teacher’s demonstration	59	23.32
Be aware of mistakes	44	17.39
Positive affective factors	42	16.60
Save time	18	7.11
Timing	15	5.92
Engage the whole class	6	2.37
Negative affective factors	5	1.97
Total mentions	253	100.01

Error due to rounding.

The most frequent theme (Theme 1) was that recasts would ‘leave a deep impression’. Among the mentions, 38 mentions expressed a deep memory of the teacher’s authentic expression and/or standard pronunciation, six mentions indicated a deep impression/memory of mistakes, and the remaining 20 did not express explicitly what the deep impression/memory entailed.

Theme 2, ‘need/listen to the teacher’s demonstration’, had 23.32% of total mentions. The participants commented that they would need the teacher to demonstrate the appropriate or correct answer. The reasons given included their low level of oral English proficiency, their high level of anxiety and/or their planned speech/talk in class. Student 46 commented that ‘I don’t know when I make a mistake, and even if I recognize it, I don’t know how to correct it. I need the teacher to demonstrate the correct answer. Then I will remember the appropriate expression and pronunciation’. Forty-five of 59 mentions referred to the role of models and listening to what the teacher said carefully because what the teacher said in recasts was more authentic and standard and that would provide a language environment that nurtured their sense of English. For example, Student 15 commented, ‘What the teacher said is often simpler, but he expresses complex meaning clearly. I want to listen to how he expresses the same meaning as the student’s’, and Student 147 commented, ‘If the teacher corrects us, this naturally enhances our intuition of how English is spoken’. Further, 20 of the total mentions in this category pointed to repeating or imitating what the teacher said in recasts.

Theme 3, ‘be aware of the mistake’, accounted for 17.39% of total mentions. Many comments in this category emphasized that recasts gave them a reference, which enabled them to correct themselves. Further, they commented that recasts allowed them to realize their multiple mistakes. Student 148 commented, ‘After the teacher’s correction, the student could compare what the teacher said with what he/she said. Therefore, the student could find not only the grammatical mistake but also the word used incorrectly’.

Apart from the comments on how recasts would help error correction, the participants commented that recasts provide a positive affective environment (Theme 4). Recasts could help them to relax, avoid embarrassment and even encourage them to become more active in the class. Such mentions took 16.60% of the total mentions. Note that the teacher’s correction would make the student feel he/she was being noticed or important to the teacher. For example, Student 182 stated: ‘I feel encouraged if he corrects my mistakes (referring to recasts). It shows the teacher’s responsibility, and the student wants to be more active in class. Further, the student will have a good impression of the teacher’.

The four other minor themes were ‘save time’ (Theme 5), ‘timing’ (Theme 6), ‘engage the whole class’ (Theme 7) and ‘negative affective factors’ (Theme 8). Two of the themes concern the brief, immediate delivery of recasts after an erroneous utterance in the treatment lesson. Theme 7, ‘engaging the whole class’, and Theme 8, ‘negative affective factors’, each contributed less than 3% of total mentions.

Learners’ Perceptions of Negotiated Prompts

The eight themes that arose from the participants’ comments on negotiated prompts are presented in Table 2 below. The comments are numbered from the highest to the lowest number of mentions and percentages. Six of the nine themes (Themes 1, 2, 5, 6 and 8) were positive about the usefulness of negotiated prompts for L2 learning and accounted for 64.59% of total mentions. The remaining themes (Themes 3, 4 and 7) were negative, accounting for 35.39% of the total.

Table 2.

A Summary of Themed Comments on Negotiated Prompts.

Themes	Frequency of Mention	Percentage (%)
1. A deep impression/memory	95	26.68
2. A thinking process	67	18.82
3. Difficulty to detect or self-correct mistakes	58	16.29
4. Negative affective factors	56	15.73
5. Be aware of mistakes	45	12.64
6. Engage the whole class	13	3.65
7. Waste time	12	3.37
8. Positive affective factors	10	2.80
Total mentions	356	100

Theme 1, ‘a deep impression/memory’, accounted for 26.68% of total mentions. Many participants stated this theme at the end of their comments; therefore, Theme 1, with the highest frequency, could be explained by some subsequent themes that were identified in the comments. Two reasons were stated to explain why negotiated prompts were believed to generate a deep impression/memory. First, negotiated prompts engage students in a thinking process, which ranks as the second most frequently mentioned theme, accounting for 18.82% of total mentions. A representative comment from Student 39 was: ‘After the teacher’s feedback, I have to think if what I said was right or wrong, and in the process of thinking about it, I have to discover my mistakes’. Second, the feedback makes a student aware of his/her mistake, which ranks as the fifth most frequently mentioned theme, accounting for 12.64% of total mentions. The comments stated that negotiated prompts could help them to notice the mistakes ‘directly’, ‘accurately’ and ‘clearly’ via self-correction. For example, Student 129 commented that ‘Through the teacher’s feedback, a student can immediately realize the mistake made; the student then has to start thinking of the correct answer’.

Theme 3 was ‘difficulty to detect or self-correct mistakes’, accounting for 16.29% of the total mentions. Several reasons were provided. First, prompts were not very explicit for some students; for example, ‘most times the teacher’s feedback was not very obvious, and the student does not know which sentence was wrong or which word was wrong’ (Student 90). Second, it is difficult to think of a better answer than the current one, as a student may have prepared his/her speech silently before speaking up. For instance, Student 110 said, ‘Most times, I’ve prepared what to say before I talk. What I say is then the best answer in my opinion, but if I make a mistake and am asked to self-correct, I cannot correct myself’. Third, nervousness makes it difficult to think of a correct answer. For example, Student 49 commented that ‘When I make a mistake, I am very nervous. Even with the teacher’s feedback, I cannot think of the correct answer’.

Theme 4 relates to ‘negative affective factors’, accounting for 15.73% of the total mentions. The mentioned negative feelings include anxiety, embarrassment, discouragement and interruption. Such reported negative feelings were due to the teacher’s feedback itself and the peer’s help when a student could not correct himself/herself. In terms of peer help, some participants commented, for example, ‘Why don’t I know what other students know? I feel ashamed or embarrassed’ from Student 200, and ‘It’s very noisy when a lot of students tell you the answer together. I don’t like that’ from Student 144.

In addition to the above-mentioned major themes, three minor themes occurred. In the main study, a negotiated prompt often led to multiple turns and such a feature might lead to the following comments: (1) it would engage the whole class in deep thinking and thus focus them on the class content (Theme 6), and (2) it would waste class time and the teacher might not finish what he had planned to teach (Theme 7). Each of these themes accounted for less than 5% of total mentions. Another minor theme (Theme 8) was that prompts could lead to positive affective factors for a few students, such as ‘confidence’ and ‘sense of success’.

Discussion

As the analysis revealed, the participants’ comments on recasts and prompts were mostly positive (98.53% and 64.59%, respectively). These positive comments indicate a favourable attitude toward error correction among the participant students, which is validated by previous studies (Bang, 1999; Casciani and Rapallino, 1991; Loewen et al., 2009; Schulz, 1996, 2001). However, recasts gained a higher percentage of positive comments than negotiated prompts, which might indicate the participants had a more favourable attitude toward the former feedback than the latter.

More importantly, many of the participants’ comments on how the two feedback types may help their L2 learning are consistent with scholarly opinions. The comments on recasts lend support to Long’s claims about this feedback (1996; Long, 2007). That is, recasts juxtapose a non-target-like utterance against a target utterance to make the learner aware of the error made (via the theme ‘be aware of mistakes’), the feedback is not likely to stimulate negative affective feelings of L2 learners (via the theme ‘positive affective feelings’), and the feedback is ‘timing’ and ‘saving time’. In a similar vein, some of the comments made on negotiated prompts support Lyster’s (2004) arguments for the benefits of prompts, for example ‘a deep impression about the mistakes they made’, ‘a thinking process’ and ‘be aware of mistakes they made’.

However, some of the comments on the two feedback types have gone beyond those discussed in the literature. An issue worthy of attention relates to how recasts work for L2 acquisition. Long (1996; Long, 2007) argues that recasts work for L2 acquisition because of the negative evidence contained in the feedback, which seemed to hold for some of the students, as 17.39% of mentions were about their ability to recognize mistakes after listening to the teacher’s demonstration. However, some participants mentioned their deep memory of the corrective model, private talk to imitate the teacher’s recasts and deep appreciation of the teacher’s authentic pronunciation. These comments are consistent with the findings of previous interactionist research that probed learner perceptions of recasts (Egi, 2007; Ohta, 2000). Given that the main study found more significant effects for recast effectiveness, these comments lend direct support to the argument that learners may use either positive or negative linguistic evidence or a combination of both evidence types in the feedback (Ellis and Sheen, 2006). Another issue worthy of mention relates to the comments that recasts can create a deep impression/memory of the correct model or the mistake made. Some scholars (Lyster and Ranta, 2013; Panova and Lyster, 2002) argue that recasts can be ambiguous for learners as the reformulation of their meaning, or that they only lead to simple repetition of the correct form. The comments in the current study for this theme indicate that recasts are not ambiguous, at least for some learners, and can also leave the same deep impression/memory on learners as prompts do.

Unsurprisingly, some of the comments about negotiated prompts are also beyond those discussed in the literature. The participants mentioned the difficulty in detecting or correcting their own mistakes after the feedback (16.29% of total mentions). This themed comment echoes the interaction episodes found in the recorded treatment lessons. The negotiated prompt episodes were mostly with multiple feedback moves and learner responses. The reasons mentioned by the participants included a certain level of implicitness of negotiated prompts, such as clarification requests, their prepared answers before they spoke and their nervousness. Also, this study found that 15.73% of the participants mentioned negative affective factors following negotiated prompts. A particular factor was peer correction when a student could not self-correct his/her error in response to the teacher’s prompt. This result confirms Bang’s (1999) finding that L2 learners do not like to be corrected by their peers, which contradicts Lyster’s (2004) view that peer correction following prompts is an advantage of the feedback. Given the comments about the negative affective feelings associated with negotiated prompts, Long’s (2007) suggestion deserves more focused attention; that is, if negotiated prompts provoke negative affective feelings, the negative linguistic evidence contained in the feedback may not be useful at all.

Conclusion and Implications

This study investigated a group of Chinese university students’ perceptions of recasts and negotiated prompts. The majority of the comments made by participants indicated that the two types of feedback were useful for their English learning, and support scholarly claims about the utility of the feedback, such as those made by Long (1996; Long, 2007) and Lyster (2004). This majority view may reflect that the students like correction overall, regardless of the feedback type. It may be better, therefore, for L2 practitioners to provide mixed feedback types. However, when the feedback is provided, the practitioners need to accommodate individual learner’s needs, as there were also negative responses for the two feedback types. For example, if a learner shows an inclination towards negative affective feelings, the teacher should reconsider whether to correct the learner through a prompt. If the teacher spontaneously provides a prompt and the student cannot offer self-correction, the teacher should not ask a student peer to provide a correct model because, as shown in the comments, students do not like peers to correct their mistakes. Another example is that if a student shows signs of needing help, it may be better for the teacher to provide a recast, either as the student’s first attempt at error correction or as the second one following a prompt.

Although the comments collected provide insight into how a group of Chinese university learners perceived recasts and negotiated prompts, this study has design limitations and concerns for external validity. The interaction episodes were edited from the treatment lessons that were provided to the recast and negotiated prompt groups. An equal number of recasts and prompt episodes were shown to the participants, but the prompt episodes were shown before the recast episodes. No counterbalanced design was involved, such as with half of the participants being shown the prompt episodes first and the other half being shown the recast episodes first. It is unclear, therefore, how the lack of a counterbalanced design would have affected the participants’ reported perceptions. As for the concerns for external validity, patterns within this data may be limited to the foreign language-learning environment, where less exposure to the target language might have made the students value the authentic models provided in the recasts. The limitations of this study imply a need for more research to investigate learner perceptions of corrective feedback. Future research can engage with a more robust research design, which, for example, incorporates a counterbalanced approach so that any potential impact of interaction episodes on reported perceptions is removed. Moreover, future research should examine learner perceptions by involving learners who differ in L2 proficiency levels and who have had different experiences in the classroom contexts where they learn the L2. Despite some limitations, this study has deepened researchers’ understanding of how recasts and prompts work for L2 learning in a classroom context, especially through reporting the perceptions of the learners that went beyond scholarly assumptions.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

I want to thank all the participant learners who joined the study. I also would like to thank a few colleagues who helped me to collect the data or provided feedback on my draft. You know who you are. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Huifang Li

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