Iranian EFL Students’ Perceptions and Preferences for Teachers’ Written Feedback: Do Students’ ideas Reflect Teachers’ Practice?

The present study-both qualitative and quantitative--explored fifty EFL learners’ preferences for receiving error feedback on different grammatical units as well as their beliefs about teacher feedback strategies. The study also examined the effect of the students’ level of writing ability on their views about the importance of teacher feedback on different error types. Data was gathered through the administration of a questionnaire, verbal protocol analysis, and students’ writing scores. The results of repeated measures, multivariate analysis of variance, and frequency counts revealed that the majority of the students expect and value teachers’ written feedback on the following surface-level errors: transitional words, sentence structure, verb tenses, adverbs, punctuation, prepositions, and spelling, respectively. The results of think-aloud protocol analysis indicated that students’ beliefs about the importance of feedback on different grammatical units are formed as a result of the teacher’s practice and his emphasis on certain types of feedback and feedback strategies. Finally, the findings of thestudy showed that the L۲ learners’ level of writing ability influences their views about the importance of feedback on errors pertinent to particular grammatical units.