Oral Corrective Feedback and Its Impact on Learners’ Speaking Skills: Tunisian EFL Students as a Case Study

Ounis Tesnim

doi:10.11648/j.ijll.20190703.15

Abstract

The present research paper tries to discover the effect of teachers’ oral corrective feedback (OCF) on EFL learners’ speaking skills (grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, and fluency). The study relies on the use of an experimental design and direct observations. 20 participants formed the experimental group. All subjects are intermediate foreign language learners of English (EFL). They are given an initial pre-test. Then, this experimental group undergoes intensive oral corrective feedback (mainly through prompts, recasts and explicit correction) delivered by their teacher during various oral activities. Finally, a post-test is applied. The analysis of the pre-test and post-test scores of the experimental group both quantitavely and qualitatively (using the MELA-Scoring Matrix) and the calculation of the mean rate of errors pre 100 words shows that learners’ progress in oral performances vary from one individual to another. The findings of this study reveal that immediate and explicit OCF was able to positively affect EFL learners’ grammatical development; yet, it was not helpful to ameliorate the learners’ utterances in terms of vocabulary, fluency and pronunciation.

Highlights

The role of corrective feedback (CF) in language learning and teaching has gained much attention among researchers and it has become a highly controversial issue, especially with the shift of focus from language forms to language functions [1]
This study aims at discovering: Whether EFL teacher’s oral corrective feedback positively affects and endorses the development of speaking skills, or not; relying on a case study which I carried out on a group of intermediate Tunisian EFL learners to assess their oral production in relation to oral corrective feedback contribution
The results clearly prove evidence that the rate number of errors found in the participants’ speech in the post-test (x=5) is the same as in the post-test. This result implies that even though learners were subject to teacher’s oral corrective feedback, which was meant to treat and to correct their dis-fluency problems, their utterances were not significantly improved in terms of fluency. These results show that Tunisian EFL students did not benefit from their teacher’ OCF targeting their fluency deficiencies

Summary

Introduction

The role of corrective feedback (CF) in language learning and teaching has gained much attention among researchers and it has become a highly controversial issue, especially with the shift of focus from language forms to language functions [1]. Opponents maintain that changes in the learner’s competence can only be initiated by primary linguistic data, not by corrective feedback [4]. They even advocate the idea of abandoning corrective feedback altogether in classroom interaction to avoid subsequent problems [5]. In Krashen’ s [6] view error correction is a serious mistake because; first, it puts learners on the defensive and second, it only supports the development of learned knowledge and plays no role in acquired knowledge

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