Gesture-enhanced recasts have limited effects: A case of the regular past tense

Autor: Kimi Nakatsukasa
Rok vydání: 2019
Předmět:
Zdroj: Language Teaching Research. 25:587-612
ISSN: 1477-0954
1362-1688
DOI: 10.1177/1362168819870283
Popis: This study investigates whether gesture-enhanced recasts lead to better production of the English regular past tense. Fifty-nine low-intermediate ESL students at a US university took part in communicative activities in class, during which they received, respectively, no feedback, verbal recasts, or gesture-enhanced recasts, the latter being a verbal recast accompanied by a point-back gesture indicating the non-target-like use or absence of the past tense. All learners also completed two assessments, a grammar test about the regular past tense and an oral production test that was designed to elicit the regular past tense, as a pre-test, an immediate post-test, and a delayed post-test a week later. Then, a repeated-measure ANOVA was used to analyse the linguistic development, using the obtained test scores. The results showed that there was no difference across the conditions in the grammar test, owing to the ceiling effect. On the other hand, learners significantly improved from the pre-test to the post-test in the oral production test, but there were no differences across the conditions. This contradicts a previous finding that teachers’ pedagogical gestures during recasts better facilitated the development of locative prepositions. Further, this study discusses how learning types (rule-based vs. item-based) involved in two different linguistic targets and different gestures used in the two studies may affect the efficacy of recasts.
Databáze: OpenAIRE