Portuguese EFL learners and teachers’ beliefs on corrective feedback

Description

Corrective Feedback (CF), “responses to learner utterances containing an error” (Ellis, 2006:28), is an everyday practice for language teachers. Research has shown strong support for the effectiveness of CF in foreign language learning (Lyster, Saito & Sato, 2013; Pawlak, 2014) and it has established itself as a key component in form-focused instruction.
Beliefs about CF refer to the opinions and attitudes learners and teachers hold about how useful CF can be and how it can be implemented in the classroom, and have been recognized as a relevant factor in the learning process in terms of learner motivation and learner achievement (e.g. Dörnyei, 2005; Tanaka, 2004). Several studies have concluded that learners wish to be corrected more often than teachers deem adequate (e.g. Brown, 2009; Schulz, 2001). On the other hand, many teachers fear they may inhibit the student or hinder communication and, therefore, opt for not correcting all mistakes (e.g. Lasagabaster & Sierra, 2005), for using delayed correction (e.g. Tomczyk, 2013) or implicit CF-strategies such as recasts (e.g. Bell, 2005).
The present study investigates English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and teachers’ beliefs about oral CF. There are various reasons why this research is important. Firstly, the success of CF may be mediated by preferences and expectations about its frequency, timing, strategy, and delivering agent, as well as the specific errors being addressed. Secondly, examining the beliefs of both learners and teachers enables us to identify disparities that may significantly affect students’ motivation to learn the language. Finally, understanding these beliefs provides essential insights into whether students and teachers’ perceptions align with research outcomes regarding the effectiveness of CF.
166 9th grade EFL learners studying in a Portuguese state school and their 5 teachers took part in this study. A belief Likert-scale questionnaire including an open-ended field was administered to explore learners and teachers’ CF beliefs. The questionnaire items were organized into five categories: necessity and frequency of error correction, timing of error correction, types of errors and their correction, effectiveness of CF strategies and delivering agent. The results revealed that both learners and teachers believe in the importance of CF. While learners expressed a preference for immediate CF, their teachers prefer correcting after the learner’s turn. Both groups believe that errors that interfere with communication, grammar and vocabulary errors should most often be corrected.
Learners perceive explicit corrections and recasts as the most effective strategies, whereas teachers favor recasts and prompts. Learners regard the teacher as the main delivering agent of CF, followed by self-correction, while teachers opt for promoting selfcorrection, but also provide CF themselves and resort to peer feedback. Results will be presented and discussed in this session as we seek to contribute to the debate about the background factors that may predict learners’ beliefs about CF, shared preferences and expectations across the different contexts where the topic has been investigated, the impact of learners’ beliefs as a mediating factor in CF provision, and to reflect on the implications of research findings for teaching practices.

Period	1 Jul 2023
Event title	XVII Fórum de Partilha Linguística / 17th Forum for Linguistic Sharing
Event type	Conference
Location	PortugalShow on map
Degree of Recognition	International