Iranian EFL Learners’ Beliefs about Feedback Provision on their Pronunciation Errors

Investigating learners’ attitudes towards pronunciation teaching and learning is a potential subfield of survey in the fields of second language acquisition (SLA) and English language learning and teaching. The purpose of this study was to find out how Iranian EFL learnerswould prefer their pronunciation mistakes to be corrected. One hundred ninety-three (193) EFL learners of various language proficiencies responded to an online questionnaire. The results indicated that a large percentage of learners (65%) preferred teacher correction overpeer correction, probably because teacher correction is more time-saving, effective and accurate than other types of correction (i.e., self- and other-correction). Considering timing of correction (i.e., immediate versus delayed correction), about half of the participants(50.8%) stated accuracy in pronunciation was important for them and expected the teacher to apply immediate correction whenever a mistake occurred. The finding suggests that the learners were divided in their opinions regarding this aspect of feedback provision. A sampleof 20 randomly selected respondents were also interviewed regarding their beliefs about feedback provision. the participants at lower levels mainly preferred teacher correction, correction of all errors, including both global and local ones, and immediate feedback onerrors (without interrupting the learner’s speech). However, interviewees at higher levels typically preferred self-correction in the first place, and some peer correction as the second option. Further results based on the learners’ gender, age, number of language learning years,language proficiency, and academic degrees will be given in this presentation. We hope that the findings of this study can help the mainstream pronunciation teaching and learning practices.

Keywords:

Pronunciation , English , Iranian EFL learners , Learners’ Beliefs , Feedback