Under the direction of Dr. Alison Mackey, Ms. Takako Egi will collect data for her doctoral dissertation on second language learning. She will study recasts, a type of feedback where teachers or native speakers reformulate learners' problematic utterances without changing the original meanings (e.g., Learner: "I have a three key"; Teacher: "three keys"). Ms. Egi will focus on the question of whether learners perceive recasts as responses to the content or to both the content and grammatical form of their utterances. Her experimental research will involve 70 learners of Japanese whose knowledge of the language will be tested before and after communicating with a native speaker of Japanese. The native speaker will provide recasts following learners' problematic utterances in those conversations. The learners will also be interviewed about their perceptions of the feedback that they receive. Their perceptions of recasts will be analyzed in relationship to their improvement in Japanese as measured by comparing pre-test and post-test results.
This research is significant both for theories of language learning and for the practice of second language teaching. It will advance theory of second language acquisition by providing a finely-grained analysis of the developmental benefits of recasts. The project will also provide classroom teachers with guidelines about effective feedback in the second language classroom.
