The Effect of Oral Corrective Feedback Training on Novice and Experienced Teachers' Perceptions and Pedagogical Styles of Iranian EFL Teachers[Latin Thesis]

Elham Barooti

Teachers and teaching have long been an important factor in EFL classrooms. Although much has been written and different studies have been carried out about oral corrective feedback, to the best knowledge of the researcher, not many studies have investigated the teachers' teaching styles and their preference for using oral corrective feedback. The emphasis of this mixed-methods study was on the effect of oral corrective feedback instruction on EFL teachers' oral corrective feedback perceptions and their pedagogical styles. Besides, it has examined if the teachers’ perceptions of oral corrective feedback and pedagogical style would contribute to their use of oral corrective feedback types in the classroom. To this end, two questionnaires, Pedagogical Style Questionnaire developed by Grasha (1996) and Oral Corrective Feedback Perception Questionnaire developed by the researcher, were distributed among 48 Iranian EFL teachers including both genders as the pretest and posttest. Moreover, in the qualitative phase, the researcher conducted 40 classroom observations with the teachers who had marked the questionnaires (each teacher was observed once) using a researcher-made observation checklist to examine their actual use of oral corrective feedback types in the classroom. All the 40 classes were recorded; therefore, study made use of a corpus entailing around 60 hours of classroom recording. Finally, a semi-structured interview was carried out with 40 teachers to provide a deeper insight into the teachers' perceptions of oral corrective feedback and how their pedagogical style and oral corrective feedback perceptions would influence their choice and use of oral corrective feedback types. The results, using Wilcoxon Signed Ranks Test, Analysis of Covariance (ANCOVA), and Multivariate Analysis of Variance (MANOVA), revealed that oral corrective feedback instruction has had a positive effect on EFL teachers' oral corrective feedback perception and their pedagogical styles except for the facilitator style. Furthermore, there was a statistically significant effect of oral corrective feedback instruction on Iranian EFL teachers’ perceptions of corrective feedback with different genders. Regarding the qualitative results of the study, it was concluded that the teachers' pedagogical styles have had an effect on their preferences for choosing oral corrective feedback types. Additionally, the findings revealed recast as the most frequent type used by all teachers having a different teaching style. The findings of this study have implications for teachers, teacher educators, and language researchers in that by holding similar courses, teacher trainers and educators assist teachers in changing their perceptions, knowledge, and practices of oral corrective feedback and in turn can affect teaching skills and professional development.