The Effects of Recasts, Prompts, and No Corrective Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners’ Recognizing the Accuracy of Grammatical Structures

The present study was conducted to investigate the effectiveness of recasts, prompts, and no corrective feedback on EFL development. To fulfill the purpose of the study, 90 learners of English as a foreign language in a non-profit university in Saveh were selected by means of administering the Standardized Nelson Language Test. These 90 learners were classified into three homogenous groups (two experimental groups and one control group). Subsequent to taking a grammaticality judgment pretest, the learners were provided with six sessions of treatment on some grammatical structures. The participants received a form-focused instruction regarding the aimed structures during these sessions and then the recast group received recasts and the prompt group received prompts while doing tasks on erroneous utterances, but the control group did not receive any corrective feedback. After the treatment, the three groups were post-tested through another immediate and delayed grammaticality judgment posttest. The analysis of variances (ANOVAs) demonstrated that the prompt group outperformed the recast group in both immediate and delayed posttests. It was also concluded that the performances of both the recast and control groups were the same in the immediate posttest. In addition, the recast and prompt groups performed better than the control group in the delayed posttest. Therefore, it was revealed that prompts lead to a better recognition of the accuracy of the grammatical structures in comparison to recasts and no corrective feedback.