The Impact of Gender and Task Nature on Iranian EFL Learners’ Oral Corrective Feedback Preferences

Adopting strategies and approaches to CF mostly depends on teaching methodology employed in a language course and generally are decided upon by teachers and institutions. However, students’ preferences for CF needs to be considered as an important factor to avoid discrepancies between students’ expectations and actual CF practices. This study examined Iranian EFL learners’ preferences regarding oral CF in a TOEFL speaking course. 32 participants answered a 30-item questionnaire to give their views concerning their CF expectations. The questionnaire investigate learners’ preferences regarding how, when and by whom they preferred to be corrected and whaterror types they deemed necessary for correction. The results showed that based on the nature and objective of the course which prepared students to take the speaking section of the TOEFL test, students cared about their accuracy while fluency for these students was of secondary importance. Therefore, CF was regarded as crucial and necessary by the participants and they considered their grammatical errors as the most important one to be corrected followed by vocabulary and pronunciation errors. In terms of CF type, explicit and delayed corrective feedback were the most preferred error correction forms. Furthermore, students’ gender affected their expectation aboutwho should correct them and males preferred their teacher to correct them and females favored self-correction and peer correction more than males. Finally it can be concluded that attitude toward different feedback types and types of errors that learners preferred to be corrected were mostly affected by the nature and the objective of the tasks and the course in general

Keywords:

Corrective feedback (CF) , oral CF , Learner’s preferences , gender