Individualized Assessment of the Effect of Recasts and Prompts on Grammatical, Lexical, and Phonological Errors

There is a mismatch between the types of errors that receive corrective feedback (CF) and those that learners manage to notice; the beneficial effects of CF on some linguistic targets in comparison to some others have been reported. The present study explored the effectiveness of recasts and prompts with regard to different linguistic targets (grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation). Seventy six intermediate Iranian learners of English, randomly assigned to two experimental groups and one control group, were exposed to recasts, prompts, or no feedback condition. Fifty four hours of the interactional episodes were audio-recorded, transcribed, and later coded for types of error. Analyses of individualized immediate and delayed-posttest results indicated no significant difference in the performance of the prompt and recast groups in dealing with grammatical and lexical errors but outperformance of the recast group in pronunciation errors was observed in comparison to the prompt group. Also, the two experimental groups achieved statistically significant gains compared with the control group in all the linguistic domains targeted in this study.