ABSTRACT
A large body of research has demonstrated that recasts may enhance the salience of target features and direct learners to contrast their erroneous utterances with their interlocutors’ reformulation, thereby focusing learners’ attentional resources on the target form and potentially supporting noticing and subsequent second language (L2) development. The current research seeks to investigate the relationship between task modality, salience, noticing, and the contingency of recasts. Fourteen intermediate ESL learners completed three information-gap tasks with a researcher in face-to-face, video-chat, and written text-chat. Results suggest that recasts provided in face-to-face and video-chat supported increased salience of target forms when compared to text-chat. Contingent recasts were also noticed more often than non-contingent recasts across all modalities, suggesting interesting patterns in terms of the relationship between task modality, contingency of recasts, noticing, and subsequent learning opportunities.
