The Effect of Recast vs. Self Correction on Writing Accuracy: The Role of Awareness

Abstract

Studies in support of the facilitative role of correction in either forms of recast, repetition, confirmations, compression checks, or clarification request abound (Ellis, 2003). Among these studies recast has proved to be the most frequent type of error correction in classroom [30] [32]; however,   self-correction or elicitation might make students notice the gap more than recast. To illuminate the difference, two methods of recast and self correction were applied to two groups of students to see if there would be any difference between two methods on the students' writing accuracy regarding the use of past tense. Man Whitney, along with Wilcoxon, was run as the main statistical techniques to examine the effectiveness of methods of error correction on students' writing accuracy. The result of this study showed that there is no significant difference between the two methods of correction although students improve after treatment; however, self correction outperformed recast and recast did not improve students' accuracy in posttest.