Feedback on Grammatical Accuracy: Comparing Perceptions and Practices on the Teachers’ and Learners’ Parts

Abstract

An advantage of the communication-based instruction in an EFL situation is prioritizing fluency and meaning negotiation though of course at the cost of accuracy. Researchers have, therefore, found feedback on the learners’ erroneous utterances quite appealing so that form can be attended to against the wider backdrop of meaning-focused involvement in communication. This present study qualitatively and quantitatively sought to investigate the teachers’ and intermediate learners’ perceptions as well as the teachers’ practices concerning corrective feedback types, sources of feedback, and types of grammatical errors that occur and need to be attended to during the classroom conversations. The study was conducted in two private language institutes in Tabriz, Eastern Azerbaijan Province, Iran. The instructional materials were Top Notch course books. For the purpose of the study, 6 teachers and 60 EFL learners were focused on. First, the classes of 6 teachers were observed. Then, the teachers and learners completed a questionnaire on corrective feedback. The results indicated that learners showed strong agreement toward using explicit feedback. On the contrary, teachers usually neglected the learners’ grammatical errors at the classroom to maintain the flow of interaction. Another important finding about sources of feedback was that teachers and learners preferred teacher correction to peer correction or self-correction. Finally, both teachers and learners expressed strong agreement about feedback on serious grammatical errors during conversation though the former tended to agree more with the feedback on less serious and frequent grammatically erroneous utterances.