The effect of recorded oral feedback on EFL learners' writing

Abstract

While there is general agreement among learners, teachers, and scholars that constructive feedback on writing is necessary to revision, there are fewer consensuses on how feedback should be given, when, by whom, and what sort of feedback is most effective (Weigle, 2014). Providing feedback on writing is generally categorized into three types: written comments, individual conferences, and recorded oral feedback. As the first two types are believed to be very time-consuming and lots of workloads, recording comments, along with the advances in technology over the last decades, has opened new possibilities for feedback in the form of podcasts or other digitally recorded means. In this study, the effect of recorded oral feedback to the writing of the English as a foreign language (EFL) learners was taken into scrutiny. In so doing, two different types of feedback (i.e., audio-recorded comments and metalinguistic written corrective feedback) were given to the learner writing in two groups respectively. The treatment lasted for approximately two months, in which the participants received two different types of feedback to their writing (e.g., recorded oral feedback and metalinguistic written corrective feedback). Results indicated that the group receiving audio-recorded comments on their writing outperformed the latter in their content, and organization, while no significant difference was observed between the two groups in clarity and sentence-level accuracy.