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Open Access Knowledge and Scholarship

Date of Award

7-2015

Culminating Project Type

Thesis

Degree Name

English: Teaching English as a Second Language: M.A.

Department

English

College

College of Liberal Arts

First Advisor

Michael Schwartz

Second Advisor

John Madden

Third Advisor

Shawn Jarvis

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.

Abstract

This paper examines the impact of verbal and gestural recasts on L2 development. Recasts are the most commonly studied type of corrective feedback in classroom interaction research (Ellis & Sheen, 2006). It is one of the most common ways to give feedback in an instructional context. However, recasts require the double processing of semantic and syntactic information by the learner (Doughty & Varela, 1998). Therefore, students may misunderstand it as meaning negotiation, which may affect students’ noticing (Amar & Spada, 2006). Gestures, as a way to assist people to get the meaning across in interaction, are known for their easy-to-notice feature (Schegloff, 1984). This study investigates the impact of verbal and gestural recasts in isolation and in combination on second language (L2) development, specifically for an ESL context.

Comments/Acknowledgements

I would like to acknowledge a number of individuals who offered me a tremendous amount of help to make this thesis possible. First of all, I would like to thank my chairperson Dr. Michael Schwartz, who was willing to meet me countless times to offer different perspectives on my topic and gave me so much inspiration. Second, I would like to thank my committee members Dr. John Madden and Dr. Shawn Jarvis, who gave me so much constructive feedback. Last but not least, I want to thank my parents, Chunwang Han and Wenli Jia, and my host parents, Marlys Tanner and Doug Tanner, for giving me so much support in pursuing my dream.

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