‘Recast’ in a new light: insights for practice from typical language studies

Abstract

This article reviews the nature andfunction of recasts, a well-documented way of responding to young children. The paper challenges the definition of recast and argues that it is too broad a category to be useful, either for theories of language development or for practice. In particular, various forms of recast have featured in intervention programmes for children with language difficulties, but with mixed success. This review provides a theoretically motivated account ofjust those recasts that are likely to benefit children with language difficulties. To this end, the Contrast theory of corrective input is invoked, where the focus is on adult models that are directly contingent on child errors (Saxton, 1997). Both theoretical and empirical evidence suggests that this kind of input can facilitate the acquisition of adult-like grammatical competence.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 47 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.