The Effect of Recast on Iranian EFL Learners’ Writing Achievement

Developing English language learners’ writing skill has always been a concern in the ELT profession.This study presents the findings of an investigation on the effect of recast as a major type of indirect corrective feedback on English language learners’ writing skill. For the purpose of this study, a total number of 20 advanced language learners enrolled in writing classes were randomly selected from a language institute in Shiraz, Iran. The treatment involved assigning some topics to learners to write about. The compositions were collected and corrected after the fifth composition by the teacher using recast strategy as the major corrective feedback method. The data collected during this 5-session treatment based the pre-test of this study. Then the learners original compositions and the corrected versions were returned to them. The degree of accuracy and also the number and types of corrected errors observed in three compositions assigned later, which served as the post-test of this study, determined the degree of effectiveness of this type of indirect error correction technique on the development of writing skill. The results revealed that recast had a positive impact on decreasing errors. The comparison of the pre-test and post-test scores shows that recasts significantly assisted in increasing accuracy of writing.