Teachers’ Perceptions of Oral Corrective Feedback in Form-focused Language Classrooms: Why do they Correct the Way they do?

Abstract

This study focuses on Saudi teachers’ motivations regarding their choice of oral corrective feedback (OCF) forms, such as recasts, elicitations, and metalinguistic feedback in foreign language (FL) contexts. Many previous studies of teachers’ choices of OCF forms, and motivations for these choices, have been conducted in more communicative contexts where recasts are most commonly used, with the aim of keeping the communication going. The current study, in contrast, aims to explore teachers’ choices of, and motivations for, OCF forms in a more accuracy-focused context. The study uses rigorous methods to investigate 207 Saudi teachers’ perceptions of OCF, including 100 classroom observations, and 100 stimulated recall (SR) sessions with 10 teachers to further investigate their choices of, and motivations for, particular types of OCF, with reference to their learners’ uptake. The findings demonstrate that the teachers consider recasts to be the most effective method of correction for their students’ learning, especially in the case of pronunciation errors, in a context where the emphasis is placed on accuracy rather than on maintaining the flow of communication. This is in contrast to previous studies of OCF in more meaning-focused contexts, where recasts were used to maintain the flow of communication. The current study concludes by offering insights into some challenges that teachers in FL contexts might face and suggests some possible implications for teachers’ practice in these contexts.