The relationship between adult EFL teachers' oral feedback practices and their beliefs

Although many experimental and classroom studies show the benefits of oral corrective feedback for second language acquisition, fairly little is known about the actual practice of oral feedback in classrooms and to what extent this practice reflects teachers' beliefs. The present study presents a comparison between the observation of ten adult EFL teachers and their stated beliefs about oral feedback. It appeared that most of the teachers were not fully aware of the amount of feedback they tended to provide, nor of the different types of correction they used. Even though all the teachers believed feedback to be important, they expressed concerns about interrupting students and provoking negative affective responses. This may explain why recasts, a more implicit type of feedback, were by far the most frequent method of correction in our data. Informing teachers of the results of corrective feedback research can encourage them to use a wider variety of techniques and possibly make their teaching more effective. On the other hand, empirical studies are needed that include the factors of student personality and affective responses and which compare the effects of immediate feedback to delayed error correction. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.