A Comparative Study of the Impact of Teachers' Oral Feedback through Conferencing and Teachers' Written Feedback on Iranian EFL Students' Writing Performance [Latin Thesis]

Fatemeh Tehranifard

The primary goal of the current study was to investigate the effects of teachers' oral feedback through conferencing and teachers' written feedback on Iranian EFL students' writing performance through a mixed-methods design. The participants of the study were 58 homogeneous intermediate level female students non-randomly chosen from among 70 EFL learners at Afarinesh IELTS House in Tehran based a standard version of OPT. These participants were randomly assigned to two experimental groups, one receiving oral corrective feedback through conferencing and the other group receiving teacher's written corrective feedback. Then the learners in both groups went through the process of pretesting, intervention, and post testing. In the qualitative phase of the study and to find out the preferences of learners concerning the corrective feedback types, the researcher administered a detailed feedback preferences survey (Irwin, 2017). Several Wilcoxon-Signed Rank Test were run to analyze the data. Then, a Mann-Whitney U test was run to compare the oral and written feedback groups’ means on the posttest of writing. This was followed by describing the frequencies and percentages of the participants’ preferences of teachers’ current feedback, teachers’ future feedback, types of errors to be focused on, and preferences of types of feedback among learners. The data collected through the descriptive written documents of the learners were analyzed through employing open and axial coding to find out the preferences of the learners concerning the CF type used in the classroom. The results of data analysis revealed that teachers' oral feedback through conferencing had a significant effect on the writing performance of EFL students. Secondly, it was revealed that teachers' written feedback had a significant effect on the writing performance of EFL students. In the third phase, it was found that the written corrective feedback group had a significantly better performance than the oral corrective feedback group on the posttest of writing. In terms the participants’ preferences students greatly valued teacher written feedback and consistently rated it more valuable than oral feedback. The results showed that OCF students preferred structural, organizational, and grammatical errors to be focused on more than the WCF group, while WCF students preferred vocabulary and expression errors and errors related to content and ideas to be focused on more than the OCF group. The findings of the study present implications for the EFL classroom. Keywords: Corrective Feedback, Learner Feedback Preferences, L2 Writing, Oral Corrective Feedback, Written Corrective Feedback