The Role of Uptake to Recast in Second Language Development

The role of L2 learners’ uptake of recast has been controversial according to two aspects; (1) what motivates the production of uptake, especially the successfully repaired ones and (2) whether such uptake makes contribution to L2 acquisition (Goo & Gass, 2013). Literature on recasts suggested the explicit knowledge seeking mind and the explicit knowledge of the target form in the learners’ current L2 knowledge as the motivation for uptake because recasts are meaningfully redundant (Ellis and Sheen, 2006; Lyster & Ranta, 1997, 2013). Based on this suggestion, the present study hypothesized that the benefit of uptake might be the increase of explicit knowledge rather than that of the implicit knowledge, thus, forming an explicit learning route. A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 33 Korean adult learners whose knowledge of the target form was assessed in two types, implicit and explicit. Recasts were provided to the incorrect productions of verb forms during the four sessions of information-gap tasks. Results showed (1) uptake was not affected by one type of knowledge over the other and (2) uptake did not improve one type of knowledge over the other, though both types of knowledge have increased significantly.