Pedagogically Sound: Audio Feedback as an Alternative to Written Feedback in Distance Education: EFL/ESL Students’ and Teachers’ Perceptions and Its Effectiveness

Abstract

Feedback is indispensable for language teaching and generally delivered with written commentary. However, students perceive written feedback as insufficient because written comments are not clear and engaging. From the teachers’ perspective, providing students with written feedback is hard and time-consuming. In distance education, giving written feedback gets more daunting. To enhance the quality of feedback in online education settings, alternative modalities have been found and audio feedback is one of them. The purpose of this study is to explore whether giving audio feedback to language learners’ assignments in online education settings is an efficient technique and how it is perceived by learners and teachers. Searches were carried out in 10 databases and 221 studies were selected as they met the inclusion criteria. In this study, four themes were identified: practicality, pedagogy, differing content, and personality. Audio feedback was found to be pedagogically sound, practical only if necessary technological training provided, more wholistic in terms of content, and more personal. In the light of these findings, educational practitioners in language learning might benefit from audio feedback in distance education.