Low-literacy adult English language learners: oral recall and recasts

This study seeks to determine the impact of literacy level on oral recall accuracy in adult English language learners (ELL) and builds on Tarone, Bigelow and Hansen\u27s prior work on the subject. Eleven adult Somali and Spanish speakers completed three different activities designed to examine the oral recall accuracy of low-literacy adult ELLs using two different types of tasks. The first task-type examines how accurately students recall researcher-generated question formations. The second task-type examines how accurately students recall recasted information when using learner-generated question formations. Results suggest that there was a positive relationship between literacy level and oral recall accuracy. Moderate literacy participants outperformed low literacy participants in all three tasks. Participants with a moderate level of literacy also outperformed low literacy participants who had the same oral proficiency level in two out of the three tasks