The Effects of Oral vs. Written Corrective Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners’ Essay Writing

Abstract

This study was an attempt to investigate the effect of different types of corrective feedback on Iranian EFL learners’ essay writing. To this end, the performance of the learners as a result of two types of feedback, that is, oral feedback (OF) and written feedback (WF), and each with two subcategories (focused and unfocused) was studied. To conduct the study, two writing tasks were employed as data collection instruments to measure the learners’ essay writing skill. The participants were 75 Iranian female low- intermediate EFL learners at a language institute in Shiraz. They were asked to write two essays as pretest and posttest on the basis of two similar but not identical picture stories. Each and every participant’s writing was corrected in terms of the target structures, that is, past tense, punctuation, and capitalization. Paired samples t-test, independent samples t-test, and ANOVA were utilized. The results indicated that three types of feedback, namely, oral feedback (both focused and unfocused) and written feedback (focused) were significantly effective in the posttest whereas the written unfocused feedback was not. In other words, the participants showed a statistically significant difference in their performance in the posttest as a result of receiving these three types of feedback.