The Comparative Effect of Online Self-Correction, Peer-Correction, and Teacher Correction in Descriptive Writing Tasks on Intermediate EFL Learners’ Grammar Knowledge. The Prospect of Mobile Assisted Language Learning (MALL)

The present study investigated the effect of online self, peer, and teacher-correction in descriptive writing tasks on intermediate English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ grammar knowledge with a special attention to theprospect of mobile assisted language learning (MALL). 60 participants of the study were selected based on their scoreson the Nelson proficiency test and divided into three Telegram groups comprising a peer-correction, a self-correctionand a teacher-correction group, each with 20 students. the pretest was administered to measure the subjects grammar knowledge of participants.Afterwards, three Telegram groups( peer-correction, self-correction and teacher-correction) each with 21 members (20 students + 1 teacher) were formed, once the participants gave written consent to be amember of the groups. Then during a course of nearly one academic term (at least 16 sessions, each about 60-75minutes) the grammatical notions were taught by the teacher. The teacher provided his feedback in all the three groupsthrough direct written messages. Then after the instruction and online practice, a prompt was uploaded by the teacher. The members were required to write on the prompt in about 50 to 70 words (as a meaningful paragraph) within 15minutes and post it on the group as images of hand-written texts or typed ones. Then, in all of the three groups, their writings were corrected through self-correction, peer-correction and teacher-correction under the feedback providedby the researcher. The study used a pretest-posttest design to compare the learners’ progress after the application ofthree different types of treatment. For analyzing the data obtained from the experiment, descriptive and inferentialstatistics was used. Regarding the data analysis method, the study was quantitative, since it used parametric tests tocompare the mean scores of the participants on the grammar test. One-Way between-groups ANOVA was run to test whether there was any statistically significant difference in grammar knowledge in descriptive writing of intermediate EFL learners’ who receive mobile-assisted self-correction, peer-correction and teacher-correction. The researcher alsoused Pos-Hoc Tests to determine the exact difference between correction methods. Online self-correction, peercorrectionand teacher-correction were the independent variables and grammar knowledge was the dependent variable. Examining the result of the study prove that significance level between self-correction and teacher-correction was thestrongest (sig. = 0.000) but the significance level was a little less strong between peer-correction and teachercorrection whereas no significance was observed between self-correction and peer-correction.

Keywords:

Self Correction , Peer Correction , Teacher Correction , Grammar Knowledge