Examining student teachers' beliefs about oral corrective feedback: Insights from a teacher education program in Turkey

Abstract

Teachers' beliefs about language learning and teaching are largely shaped during pre-service teacher education. Although many empirical studies have analyzed various dimensions of how student teachers' beliefs and practices are formed, the literature is scarce with the research on student teacher's beliefs about oral corrective feedback. For the field of English language teaching, student teachers' beliefs about correcting erroneous utterances count for their future instructional choices. Thus, as an uncharted territory of inquiry, this issue merits a scholarly attention. To this end, the present study investigated the stated beliefs and behaviors of 98 nonnative student teachers via various qualitative tools; an interview and a simulation offering 20 classroom situations. The results showed that although most student teachers held a constructivist belief in defining teaching, their oral corrective feedback strategies varied in terms of correcting errors that relate to language proficiency, language components and task type.