An Investigation of Feedback Types Used by Teachers and Preferred by Students in an EFL Context in Iran

Iran, ID LLCE2015-124

The present study was an attempt to investigate the most frequent feedback types employed by EFL teachers as well as the types preferred by EFL learners. To do this, we observed an EFL conversation class in a private Institute in Tabriz for five sessions and recorded the lively discussions for further analysis. The subjects for this study were 20 intermediate-level students and all were male ranging from 17 to 20 years of old. They were selected based on the previous term final scores and were almost homogeneous. The discussions were elicited by various speaking tasks chosen from their course book,”New Interchange2”. The subjects were also interviewed by the researchers. The results of the analysis and transcriptions indicated that “recast” is the most frequent feedback type employed by the teacher. Also, the interviews showed that the learners prefer “recast” as well as “elicitation” and “explicit correction” to some extent. In the end, some pedagogical implications were made.

Keywords: Feedback-EFL context-Recast-Elicitation-Explicit correction.