Corrective Feedback to Oral Errors: A Study of EFL Teachers' Perceptions

The present study investigates EFL teachers‟ approach to corrective feedback to errors in learners‟ speaking tasks. The participants were 100 Iranian EFL teachers who were teaching intermediate and upper-intermediate levels. A Likert-scale questionnaire was employed to collect data. The issues addressed include whether feedback contributes to language acquisition, which errors should be corrected, who should do the correcting, which type of feedback is the most effective, and what is the best timing for feedback. The results of the study revealed that the participants acknowledge the contribution of corrective feedback particularly for developing accuracy, and that they show a tendency toward correcting morphosyntactic, errors, followed by pronunciation, , lexical errors, and finally, pragmatic errors. Moreover, teacher feedback was found to be preferred by the teachers to that provided by peers. A preference of group correction over individual correction was indicated, too. Implicit rather than explicit correction was found to be favored by the teachers. A consideration of learners' individual variations and a preference of immediate over delayed feedback were also emphasized by the participants. The study concludes with some relevant recommendations for conducting corrective feedback in language classrooms

کلیدواژه ها:

Corrective feedback ، speaking tasks ، teachers‟ perceptions