Teacher-initiated vs. student-initiated written corrective feedback in EFL writing

Abstract

With the popularity of student-centered pedagogy in language education, research on alternative feedback strategies to supplement teacher written corrective feedback (WCF) has flourished in different contexts. Such research, however, has viewed alternative feedback strategies as initiated, deployed, and controlled by teachers, paying little attention to students’ capability in identifying and correcting their linguistic errors on their own. The current study adopts a quasi-experimental design to investigate the impact of a student-initiated feedback intervention on undergraduate students’ error identification and correction ability at a major university in Oman. To this end, two groups of first-year students (n = 63) from two different sections of an essay writing course were assigned to a control group, who received the traditional teacher feedback, and an experimental group, who consulted alternative sources of feedback on their own. Analysis of the data from pre-test and post-test tasks revealed that while both groups significantly improved their scores on different error correction attempts over a 16-week semester, the source of feedback did not lead to significant between-group differences in the scores. Furthermore, qualitative data indicated that, despite some challenges, students drew on a variety of sources and resources to reduce linguistic errors in their writing.