EFL Students' Perceptions of the Effectiveness of Corrective Feedback on Their Written Tasks

Abstract

The study aimed to reveal the intermediate-level English language learners' perceptions of the usefulness of the feedback on the different aspects of their paragraphs (e.g., content, organization, language use, etc.) and the usefulness of various types of direct and indirect feedback. The study also aimed to explore their perceptions of the usefulness of writing in a process approach (i.e., outlining-first draft-revision-final draft) and determine students' preferences for the amount of feedback on their written works. The writing instructor of 48 of them was Turkish instructors of English (TIE), whereas 36 of them had international instructors of English (IIE). After students completed five structured paragraph writing tasks, a survey was implemented on 84 volunteer students. Descriptive statistics and non-parametric test Mann Whitney's U test were used to analyze questionnaire responses and compare students' perceptions who were trained by TIE and IIE. Open-ended responses were analyzed in MAXQDA to determine the frequencies of codes. The results indicated that both groups of students rated the usefulness of the feedback they received quite high for almost all components of their paragraphs. However, there was a significant difference between the two groups in terms of their perceptions of the usefulness of the indirect feedback with comments or error codes and process approach to writing. Students also reported that they wanted all errors in their written work corrected regardless of how they feel.