The effectiveness of giving grade, corrective feedback, and corrective feedback-plus-giving grade on grammatical accuracy

Abstract

This study compared the effects of giving grade, corrective feedback (CF), and CF-plus-giving grade on Iranian pre-intermediate EFL students' learning simple past and simple present tenses. To fulfil this objective, 84 Iranian participants were selected among 80 students based on the results of Oxford Quick Placement Test (OQPT). The selected pre-intermediate participants were then randomly divided into three equal experimental groups; CF-only group (n=28), grade-only group (n=28), and CF-plus-grade group (n=28). Afterwards, the researchers measured the participants' English grammar knowledge by administering a grammar pre-test including 20 items related to simple past and simple present tenses. After pre-testing, the researchers taught simple present tense to the participants of all groups explicitly. After teaching all points of simple present tense, the researchers gave some homework related to simple present tense to the participants to do at home. In the following session, the researchers checked the participants' homework and gave grade to one group; gave both written and oral CFs to the other group, and gave grades in addition to the CFs to the third group. In the next session, the researchers taught simple past tense to the participants of all groups explicitly. When they taught all related points of simple past tense, they gave some assignments related to simple past tense to the participants to do at home. In the next session, the researchers corrected the participants' homework through giving grade, written and oral CFs, giving grades in addition to the CFs. Finally, a post-test of grammar including 20 objective items related to simple present and simple past tenses was administered to the participants to measure the effects of the treatment on their grammar improvement. The results of One-Way ANOVA and paired-samples t-tests indicated that all experimental groups improved on their post-tests but the CF-plus-grade group had better performance than the other two groups on the post-test. The implications of this study may encourage teachers to use both grades and CFs in the EFL classrooms to correct the EFL learners' grammatical mistakes.