Issues in Applied Linguistics

This study examined the applicability of recasting to the acquisition of pragmatics. Specifically, this study investigated the effects of implicit feedback on Chinese learners of English in learning eight pragmalinguistic conventions of request. Both the pragmatic recast and control groups performed role-plays; the former received recasts on their request Head Acts (core requesting utterances), whereas the latter did not. Discourse completion tests showed that the pragmatic recast group performed better than the control group on measures of both pragmatic appropriateness and grammatical accuracy, with effect sizes of Cohen's (1998) d = 0.83 for pragmatic appropriateness and Cohen's d = 0.87 for pragmatic appropriateness and grammatical accuracy. The study highlighted the ways recasts can be implemented at the pragmatic level and demonstrated that pragmalinguistic recasting is a sound pedagogical option.