Recast and Its Impact on Second Language Acquisition

This paper is an attempt to provide a brief review of recast and its various types. Recast has been defined by many researchers whose definitions are subtly but significantly different. In most of these definitions, the researchers have focused on correcting learners’ implicitly in a communicative context. Although recast has some advantages like facilitating the delivery of complex subject matter, the most outstanding disadvantage of it is its ambiguity, which at times, may not help learners notice their mistakes. Up to now there have been many studies of the role of recast in second and foreign language acquisition. These studies have taken place in classroom contexts and in native speaker (NS)/non-native speaker (NNS) dyadic situations in addition to experimental studies in laboratory contexts. In these studies the greater effectiveness of recasts lies in situations where learners are given additional cues that help them recognize recasts as feedback on error.