Collaborative vs. Non-Collaborative Feedback and EFL Learners’ Written Accuracy: A Socio-Cognitive Perspective

The efficacy of corrective feedback (CF) is still a matter of debate. Inspired by the Sociocultural theory of L2 learning, which regards collaboration as the major contributor to learning, the presentpaper attempted to investigate whether providing learners with collaborative feedback could affect their written accuracy. To this end, a quasi-experimental study compared the written accuracy performance of three groups of Iranian EFL students (Collaborative CF group, Reformulation group,and no-feedback group) on the use of three English past tenses (simple, progressive, and perfect) in written story reproduction tasks. In the collaborative CF group, the teacher tried to push the leaners toward identifying and correcting their errors, while the learners in the reformulation group weresimply provided with the correct forms of their errors. The results showed that both collaborative and reformulation groups significantly outperformed the no-feedback group; however, there was no significant difference between the collaborative and non-collaborative reformulation groups. Thislatter finding was intriguing, as it showed the amount of CF was not a determining factor and simply making the learner notice their error through direct CF would suffice.

کلیدواژه ها:

collaborative feedback ، reformulation ، pushed output ، written accuracy