Language facilitation through stories: recasting and modelling

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Abstract
Past research has demonstrated that recasts can facilitate young children's language development, even when embedded into stories. A recast occurs when one sentence is immediately followed by another sentence which reiterates the meaning of the first, but changes one or more of its syntactical components. Twenty 3- and 4-year-old Head Start children participated in this study. Ten children were read a story which incorporated recasts into its 20-page text. Ten different children were read a story similar in every aspect to the recast story (length, pictures, vocabulary, and syntactical complexity) except that this story modelled forms rather than recasting them. Modelling differs from recasting in that there is no paired presentation of sentences. Elicitation tasks measured both groups' syntactic and lexical abilities before and after the story readings. Analyses of covariance, using pre-test scores as covariates, indicated no significant differences between the recasting and modelling groups. Both groups made equal language gains. A key factor in these results may be the shared meaning between com municators allowed by both recasts and models. These data suggest further research regarding educational and clinical applications of both recasting and modelling.