Applied Linguistics 27/2: 325330 Oxford University Press 2006

doi:10.1093/applin/aml009

FORUM

The Prerogative of Corrective Recasts

as a Sign of Hegemony in the Use of
Language: Further Thoughts on Eric
Hausers (2005) Coding Corrective
Recasts: The Maintenance of Meaning
and More Fundamental Problems

KANAVILLIL RAJAGOPALAN
State University at Campinas (UNICAMP), Brazil

The objective of this response article is to think through some of what I see as
the far-reaching implications of a recent paper by Eric Hauser (2005) entitled
Coding corrective recasts: the maintenance of meaning and more funda-
mental problems. Hauser makes a compelling, empirically-backed case for his
contention that, contrary to widespread belief, so-called corrective recasts in
SLA ought not to be seen as preserving meaning. Upon closer inspection,
Hausers point can be read as a powerful indictment of the notoriously
unequal power distribution in the use of the English language world-wide.
Corrective recasts are used not only in the context of EFL teaching but also in
the sphere of academic publishing where NS editorial assistants pay special
attention to correctively recasting submissions by NNS contributors. Although
the justification offered is typically that of polishing up the text language-wise,
such corrective recasts sometimes tamper with the intended meanings of
the texts author(s), irretrievably distorting the outcome. Needless to say,
this is by no means unique to the English language, but given the fact that
English is by far the worlds number one language of academic publishing, and
that an important part of what is expected of editorial assistants and copy editors
is a very good command of the language of publication, the NS/NNS divide is
most prone to coincide with institutionally sanctioned unequal power relations.

At first glimpse, the so-called corrective recasts (Hauser 2005) may appear
to be simply yet another means at the disposal of a foreign language teacher
to correct routine, run-of-the-mill errors made by students. And an
incredibly effective one at that! To be sure, they are far more effective
than blunt explicit corrective formulas of the type No, thats ungrammatical,
You dont say that in idiomatic English, No native speaker1 would say such
a thing, etc. For one thing, the students at the receiving end of corrective
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recasts are spared the embarrassment of being corrected right in front of

their class-matesan experience that can be very off-putting indeed,
especially for adolescent and adult learners. That direct, point-blank
corrections often offend the sensibilities of otherwise confident language
learners, not to mention the opinionated ones amongst them, is admirably
well captured in the following passage from Samuel Taylor Coleridges
Satyranes Letters (Coleridge 1906: 243).
THE DANE: [. . .] But, my dear friend! Dhink of me, as a man!
Is, isI mean to ask you now, my dear friendis I not very
eloquent? Is I not speak English very fine?
ANSW: Most admirably! Believe me, Sir! I have seldom heard
even a native talk so fluently.
THE DANE: (squeezing my hand with great vehemence) My dear
friend! Vat an affection and fidelity ve have for each other! But
tell me, do tell meis I not, now and den, speak some fault?
Is I not in some wrong?
ANSW: Why Sir! Perhaps it might be observed by nice critics in
the English language, that you occasionally use the word is
instead of am. In our best companies we generally say I am, not
I is or Ise. Excuse me, Sir! It is a mere trifle.
THE DANE: O!is, is, am, am, am. Yes, yesI know, I know.
ANSW: I am, thou art, he is, we are, ye are, they are.
THE DANE: Yes, yesI know, I knowAm, am, am, is dhe
praesens, and is is the perfectumyes, yesand are is dhe plusquam
perfectum.

Corrective recasts are veiled attempts at correcting the learners errors.

The recaster owes no apology for volunteering them, nor does he/she
feel the need to cushion their possible unsavory impact by remarks
such as It is a mere trifle. Their corrective ends are achieved, so to
speak, tangentially or in a perlocutionary fashion. Alternatively, their
corrective intent is conveyed in the form of an implicature, whose
distinctive feature has been claimed to be defeasibility. After all, one
can just as well recast someone elses utterance in order to make sure one
has got the intended message right, as in Oh, you mean to say . . ., etc. Thus,
in the very example that Hauser gives us, the NS can, if he/she chooses to,
camouflage the corrective intent by adding, say, the words in italics:
NNS: Why he is very unhappy?
NS: Why is he very unhappy? Well, life hasnt been all that easy
for him, has it?
This shows that what gives corrective recasts an edge over the more direct
and blunt ways of going about correcting the language learner is their
indirectness. The NS interlocutor, as it were, does the correction en passant
while pretending to carry on with the conversation and being interested only
in the content of what is being said.
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The danger is that NSs who get used to doing corrective recasts of NNSs
utterances often cannot help doing the same even when the occasion is
not all that appropriate for doing it. While the practice may be considered
perfectly appropriate and even recommendable in an EFL classroom, one
may want to consider it out of place in a social encounter or when talking
to total strangers. But as anyone who has ever had anything to do with
the world of EFL would readily recognize, corrective recasting is an
occupational obsession of many a language teacher. The present writer recalls
a recent television interview of a foreign diplomat where the interviewer
resorted to corrective recasting of the words spoken by the interviewee
in a context where it was difficult to tell whether the journalist was
seeking clarification or making things clearer for the viewers. The point
is that, whether in a classroom or in a TV interview, the practice of
recasting (be it corrective or clarificatory) bespeaks the assumption of
a certain power relation by one of the parties involved in the conversational
exchange. To put it differently, there is something unquestionably self-
reassuring and even patronizing about the practice of recasts, as if the
one that does the recasting were saying to the other: Without meaning to
hurt your feelings, here is what Ias an indisputable authority on this
matterwould rather say, etc.
While corrective recasts are probably unexceptionable from a purely
pedagogical point of view (of course, bearing in mind the proviso mentioned
in the foregoing paragraph), their routine use in the EFL context can also be
seen as ideologically problematic, especially when the interactants in a given
dialogic exchange are split along the NS/NNS divide. For, what the NS does
is invoke his/her authority over the language and, in one single go, declare
(a) what his/her NNS interlocutor must have wanted to convey, (b) but
either didnt or did rather clumsily. As Hauser shows in his paper, (a) is
problematic for the reason that the move crucially involves the question
of someone elses intended meaning which, in very many cases, is far
from being uniquely recoverable from the NNSs faulty construction.
To complicate matters, recent research findings indicate that it is difficult,
in practice, to differentiate between simple language management issues
and organized language management issues, because what may appear
to be simple management issues may in fact have extended implications
and, moreover, that [s]ome problem types are not unique to non-native
speakers, but appear with different frequency and distribution in non-
native speaker texts as compared with native-speaker texts (Kaplan and
Baldauf 2005: 47)
What all this goes to prove is that the NS who persists in his/her practice
of correctively recasting the NNSs remarks (mind you, these recasts can
range from phonological, lexical, syntactic, etc., through semantic and
pragmatic, and ultimately to stylistic, rhetorical, argumentative, and what
have you) is in fact invoking an authority, not just over the English
language, but all too often on the very topic being discussed and,
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not infrequently, on what can and what cannot count as a valid or

admissible argument in a given context.
In other words, there is a treacherously slippery slope that extends right
from elementary, phonologically motivated recasts to the ones whose
motivations are arguably extra-linguisticand hence decidedly outside the
purview of the NS whose putative authority, let us not forget, is generally
claimed strictly with respect to the linguistic code involved and, possibly,
some highly conventionalized uses thereof (Rajagopalan 2005). This is
especially the case when potentially ambiguous sentences are involved.
As Hauser correctly points out through examples such as the one about
Valentines Day and Hawaii, all too often the meaning presumably intended
by an NNS through the utterance of an ambiguous sentence is simply
hijacked by the NS interlocutor to suit the latters political or ideological
agendas.
We know that sentences that are ambiguous when contemplated in
isolation cease to be perceived as such in specific contexts which generally
assign to them one or another of their readings as the preferred
interpretation. It seems reasonable to speculate that one reason why the
NS and the NNS may opt for different interpretations of the same ambiguous
sentence may be that they see it as being placed in different extra-sentential
co-texts or contexts. It is at this stage that the NSs corrective recast
takes on a sombre ideological dimension. By hijacking the intended
meaning of the sentence uttered by the NNS and forcing upon it a new
interpretation, the NS may, depending on what is at stake, be seen
as imposing a new world-view on the NNS interlocutor. Understandably,
this can lead to increased resistance and friction from the learners. Small
wonder therefore that learner uptake from corrective feedback has been
shown to taper off as the focus of recasts moves from linguistic form to
meaning (Sheen 2004).
But there is nothing in the recourse to corrective recasts per se that sets
a limit to what an NS can and cannot do by way of recasts. The gut feeling
that It just doesnt make sense or that No NS would ever say a thing like
that that an NS may invoke in order to justify his/her decision to intervene
in the speech of the NNS cannot distinguish between what is strictly
linguistic or grammatical from what involves factors other than those having
to do with the linguistic code. As a matter of fact, an NS may find the
utterance by the NSS weird for any of a number of reasons, including ones
having to do with distinctive cultural codes or argumentative strategies.
Or, as in the case of the example involving the Hawaiian islands and the
historical circumstances surrounding their accession to the USA, involving
opposing political/ideological standpoints.2 What is important for us here,
however, is the fact that, as confirmed by recent research (Borg 2006),
teacherlearner relationships in an EFL classroom continue to be viewed
as rigorously one-sided. Furthermore, given that the NS/NNS divide that
often underwrites these relationships is still considered to be sacrosanct and
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inviolable in many quarters, the soft ideological underbelly of the TESOL

enterprise is safeguarded from public exposure.
But matters dont stop just there. The technique of corrective recasts is
not confined to chance encounters between an NS and an NNS (or a highly
proficient NNS and another NNS who has only a rudimentary or shaky
command of the language), or more formal, classroom conversational
exchanges. In a slightly different guise (but essentially in the very same
spirit), the technique is widely resorted to by editorial assistants of many
academic journals as they set about correcting texts submitted by NNS
authors (Canagarajah 2002). Notice, incidentally, that these texts have in
general passed through critical scrutiny and evaluation at the hands of
anonymous referees with the recommendation that they be submitted to
a revision by an NS. Or, as is sometimes the case, the author receives
an already revised (sometimes drastically rewritten) version for approval.
And it is here that problems of all sorts begin to crop up. It just doesnt
sound idiomatic English is often used and abused by editorial assistants
and copy editors for changing portions of the text radically, often twisting
the original, intended meaning unrecognizably out of shape. The NS editorial
assistant is generally not an expert on the subject matter but considers
himself/herself fully authorized (and often is authorized by the journal)
to intervene in the text the way he/she deems fitall in the name
of idiomatic English. Thus, when Hauser (2005: 110) writes that the
practice of coding . . . results in a transformation of the data (or, in this
specific case, the main thrust of a scientific text), he is pointing to a pervasive
problem in the world of academic publishing (Flowerdew 2001).
As Kumashiro points out:
The problem here is not just that feelings get hurt or that we need
to be respectful, but also that certain voices are being kept out
of the conversation, especially voices that traditionally have
been marginalized in and by the field of educational research. The
peer-review process often functions as a gatekeeper, weeding out
groups that have yet to learn or refuse to conform to prevailing
assumptions about what makes research high quality, as well as
groups that critique the mainstreamor, more precisely, that
indirectly critique the perspectives and practices of the reviewer.
(Kumashiro 2005)
Hausers important point that the problem he has identified is not one that
can be rectified or mitigated through the creation of better criteria should
give us some cause for concern. At the same time, the very fact that we can
now recognize that there is a genuine problem to be addressed here is an
encouraging sign.

Final version received March 2006

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NOTES
1 Hauser points out that he is using the
NS/NNS distinction as unproblematic
although he does recognize that it is
far from clear-cut. In this response
article, I follow suit. It is worth
mentioning here, however, that the
practice of corrective feedback and the
one-sidedness of the power relations
implied by it help shore up the myth
of the NS. Rather than simply dismiss
the distinction as ontologically
untenable, we would do better by
addressing the political use of the
distinction (Rajagopalan 1997) and its
role in the perpetuation of unequal
power relations in the TESOL
enterprise worldwide, alongside such
spin-off consequences as discrimina-
tory hiring practices, low self-esteem
of NNS teachers, etc. For, although
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