Fukuya and Zhang define a recast as “implicit corrective feedback.” Another definition of “recast” given by Han Ye in a presentation at theACTFL 2008 conference was “a native speaker’s corrective reformulation of a student’s utterance.”
It’s not very complicated in practice. Here’s a simple example:
Student: I want read.
Teacher: Oh, you want to read?
In the above example, the English teacher communicates with the student (using a question to confirm what the student had said), while at the same time making a correction (adding “to”). The teacher may or may not choose to emphasize the correction.
Here’s a slightly more subtle example:
Student: I want read.
Teacher: What do you want to read?
In this example, while you could identify a correction in the teacher’s question, the focus is more on communication and less on correcting the mistake.
Recasts don’t have to be questions, and they can be focused on pronunciation, on grammar, on vocabulary… but they always carry with them some degree of ambiguity, because recasts are not overt corrections, and some degree of repetition is a natural part of normal speech. Will the student pick up on the correction, or will the conversation just keep moving along? (Does it even matter what the student consciously notices his mistakes?)
I believe that much of my own success in acquiring Chinese has been due to (1) getting lots of practice with native speakers, and (2) being receptive to recasts.
Here’s a typical example of an exchange that might occur (in Chinese), with a string of letters representing the focal language point:
Learner: Abcde.
Native speaker: What?
Learner: Abcde.
Native speaker: Ohhh… AbcDe!
Learner: Yes, Abcde.
The native speaker’s second utterance above was a recast, but as we see in the last line of the exchange, the learner didn’t get it. Yes, the recast was almost imperceptibly different from what the learner said originally, but recasts tend to be that way (from the learner’s perspective)… especially when they involve tones. As a learner, when you become more sensitive to recasts, you’ll hear them all the time.
Think about it… some people will pay big bucks to a teacher in order to obtain explicit corrective feedback. In actuality, though, if that person is in a second language environment, he is probably getting corrective feedback all the time in the form of recasts and not even knowing it. Recasts are great because they don’t impede the flow of information and they’re usually not an embarrassing form of correction. They’re also great because you don’t get them if you don’t get out there and talk to native speakers. They’re a positive side effect of speaking practice. As a learner, recasts are your friend.
