The Utility of Written Corrective Feedback in Tertiary Education: The Case of Iraqi ESP Students (Research Paper)

This study examined the degree to which metalinguistic, direct, and indirect written corrective feedback strategies influenced Iraqi nursing students’ nursing report writing task performance in ESP courses. Moreover, it investigated these students’ perspectives on these feedback strategies. Consequently, the study was carried out using a mixed-methods design. To this end, in the quantitative phase, the researchers used convenience sampling to select ۱۱۲ nursing students from four classes of a public university in Iraq as the participants and randomly assigned these classes to three experimental groups and one control group. Moreover, they used a nursing report pretest, ۱۴ treatment sessions, and a nursing report posttest to gather the data. Furthermore, in the qualitative phase, the researchers randomly selected ۱۰ nursing students in each of the experimental groups and probed their attitudes toward their feedback strategy using an interview protocol. The results showed that all of these feedback strategies had significant positive impacts on the participants’ ESP writing ability. Nonetheless, the metalinguistic and direct strategies proved to be more advantageous than the indirect strategy. In addition, the nursing students indicated a strong preference for metalinguistic and direct strategies in their writing tasks. The results can have practical implications in Iraqi context.

کلیدواژه ها:

Error Treatment ، Written Corrective Feedback Strategies