محمود دهقان

Corrective feedback has an essential role in ELT since it ensures that learners have mastered the correct form of target language. Among all corrective feedback types, recasts in particular have been receiving considerable attention due to its ambiguous nature. This study aimed to compare full, partial and full-partial recasts to figure which one is a better way to help learners make fewer oral grammatical mistakes. The effectiveness of partial and full recasts on gender was also investigated. Implementing a quasi-experimental design, this study made use of 100 participants: 50 females and 50 males. Oxford Placement Test, test of present perfect tense and test of definite article “the” have been used as data collection instruments. In partial recast, the teacher just reformulated the learner’s erroneous utterance whereas in full recast, the teacher reformulated the learner’s utterance by repeating the whole sentence that contains the correct form of the learner’s erroneous utterance. Results revealed that partial recast group outperformed the other two groups in the use of “present perfect tense” and definite article “the”. Considering gender, the results revealed that there was no significant difference between the female and male’s performances. The authors of this study suggest that partial recast is more effective than full recast in content based classed in which the main focus is on content rather than the message being communicated.