EFL Teachers' Beliefs and Practices in Using Teacher Written Corrective Feedback on Students' Writing

Abstract

This study is a case study investigating two EFL teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding teacher written corrective feedback (WCF) on their students’ writing in a governmental senior high school in Indonesia, using questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, document analysis, and teachers’ think-aloud protocols. The results show that both teachers’ actual WCF practices used four types of WCF, which are direct corrective feedback, indirect CF, metalinguistic CF, and unfocused (comprehensive) CF, despite the way they deliver WCF is different. They provided WCF on all five aspects (grammar, vocabulary, content, mechanics, and organization), however, their WCF’s distribution was unequal and they emphasized on different aspects. Several teachers’ beliefs align/correspond with their actual practices, while the others result misalign. The teachers’ beliefs on WCF differ from each other depending on several factors related to the teachers themselves (e.g. learning and teaching experiences), their workload, time constraints, and students’ proficiency level which might contribute to the (mis)alignment of their beliefs and actual practices. Therefore, teachers’ beliefs might not always be reflected on their actual practices. This study implies that the teachers need to take professional training related to WCF and they are suggested to cooperate with students to achieve the goals of teacher written corrective feedback.