Week 5: Comment

I see myself in the participant in your post. L2 learners can do grammar exercises almost
correctly; however, when they use the grammar rules for a speaking task, it will be very
difficult for them to do four tasks at the same time: find ideas, find words, form sentences,
and use correct grammar.
I think it is appropriate for us to correct students’/friends’ grammatical errors in and after
class; however, we should be mindful of when and when not to correct depending on the
frequency of errors, errors due to exceptions of rules, etc (Brandl, 2008). As we are
encouraging our students/friends to use language to communicate, recasts can be used as
one of the communicative strategies:
o Teacher: What did you do yesterday?
o Student: I go out for coffee with my friends.
o Teacher: Oh, you went out for coffee with your friends. Where did you go?
o Student: I went to Horizon Café.
The example shows that recasts help communicators continue their “joint focus on
meaning… while still dealing with linguistic problems” (Long, 2007, p.103) and recasts is
considered by many scholars (e.g., Leeman, Long, Inigaki, Ortega, cited in Brandl, 2008) as
beneficial to learners’ L2 language development.
References:
Brandl, K. (2008). Communicative language teaching in action: Putting principles to work.
New Jersey: Pearson Prentice Hall.
Iwashita, N. (2003). Negative feedback and positive evidence in task-based interaction.
Studies in Second Language Acquisition, 25(1), 1-37.
Long, M. H. (2007). Recasts in SLA: The story so far. In Long, M. H. (Ed.), Problems in SLA
(pp.75-116). New Jersey: Erlbaum.