On the Relationship between EFL Learners' Socio-Economic Status and their Attitudes toward Oral Corrective Feedback: A Mixed-Method Study

Although many studies have focused on the language learners’ beliefs and attitudes regarding error correction, less has been done to investigate whether and how student characteristics influence their preferences. The present investigation explores how socio-economic status affects the error correction views of 140 upper-intermediate/advanced students, ranging from 23 to 31, in an EFL context. The participants' social class was determined by MacArthur scale of subjective socio-economic status. A questionnaire and a follow-up interview were employed to obtain the students' overall preferences about different aspects of oral corrective feedback (OCF). The results showed that the students unanimously favored teachers as the best provider of feedback and highly expected both local and global errors to be treated; nevertheless, whereas middle-class students would rather their errors to be corrected at the end of the class while the teacher addressed the whole class, high-class students did not mind if teachers corrected them individually as soon as they finished speaking. Besides, although predominantly the students preferred direct error correction, high-class students had a more positive view toward elicitation and self-error correction in general. The findings of this study highlight the influence of language learners' socio-economic status on how they expect their teachers to treat their oral errors.

Keywords:

error correction , grammatical errors , learners’ preferences , oral corrective feedback , socio-economic status