The Role of Recast on Left Hemisphere Dominant vs. Right Hemisphere Dominant Iranian EFL Learners

Abstract

In order to address the issue of brain dominancy in feedback reception, the present was conducted to investigate the effect of recast on Iranian EFL left brained vs. right brained learners' learning of English past tense. The data were collected from 98 adolescent EFL learners who were studying English in language institutes in Iran. Of the two left brained groups, one group was assigned as the experimental and the other as the control group and the same procedure was followed for the two right brained learners. While the two experimental groups were provided with recast, the two control groups received no recast during the study. Descriptive statistics and one way ANOVA through SPSS.16 were conducted with respect to the research question. The analysis of the participants' performance on the posttest demonstrated that the experimental groups outperformed the control groups, and left brained learners more than right brained learners benefited from recast. As a result, the efficacy of recast in establishing new grammatical knowledge was proved. Further, the brain dominancy of the learners did affect the degree of the utility of recasts in developing grammar knowledge. The present study has pedagogical implications for both English language learning and teaching.