ELT and non-ELT pre-service language teachers' stance on oral corrective feedback provision: A Turkish context

Abstract

The study examined a purposively selected sample of pre-service ELT and non-ELT teachers' stance on oral corrective feedback (hereafter, OCF) and their actual practices in the classroom during their practicum classes. The objective of the study was explore the extent of student English teachers' use of OCF strategies and whether they would prefer the OCF types that promote interaction between language teachers and their students, and among their students or not. EFL student teachers' stated beliefs and classroom practices of OCF were explored by means of utilizing a survey and qualitative methods using classroom observations and face to face interviews. ELT and non-ELT pre-service EFL teachers studying in their final years at the Departments of English Language and Literature and English Language Teaching at Ataturk University participated in the survey and twenty of them took part in the both classroom observations and the interviews. This study examined EFL pre-service teachers' beliefs of importance of OCF provision, amount of their OCF provision in the classroom, preferences for error types to be treated, preferences for OCF types to treat with, preferences between explicit or implicit OCF types, preference between input providing or output prompter OFF types preferences for the timing in order to treat the erroneous productions, and preferences for the sources of OCF provision in general. This study also investigated whether EFL pre-service teachers beliefs differ regarding their ELT or non-ELT status. The main findings indicate that the participants with both ELT or non-ELT background regard OCF provision to be essential for language progress. As for their practices in the classroom, preservice EFL teachers found errors related to grammar (98%) and vocabulary (82.8%) more important than those regarding pronunciation and semantic. With regard to their preference for OCF type, explicit correction (92.9%) was their most frequently used error OCF technique, which do not promote the interaction between the language teachers and their students, and among the students. However, the analyses detected a discrepancy between their sated beliefs of OCF provision and their actual practices in the classroom. Finally the data revealed that there are significant differences between ELT and non-ELT pre-service EFL teachers regarding their beliefs on most of the belief topics.