ABSTRACT
Theorizing and research on the role of negative feedback in Second language acquisition (SLA) has a long and somewhat turbulent history, and scholars today remain divided. Work on Second language (L2) recasts until now includes over 60 descriptive, quasi-experimental, and experimental studies of their occurrence, usability, and use in classrooms, laboratory settings, and noninstructional conversation. In the cross-sectional study, 55 young adults learning Japanese as a foreign language at an Australian university were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Both cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, recasts have been shown to exist and to exist in relatively high frequencies in all classroom and noninstructional settings observed so far. Leeman J. argues instead that recasts work because they provide enhanced salience to positive evidence. More generally, the importance of perceptual salience for acquisition has been recognized in the SLA literature for some time.
