The effects of foreign language anxiety on EFL learners' perceptions of oral corrective feedback

Abstract

The study reported in this paper explored if learners' perceptions of two types of oral corrective feedback, recasts, and metalinguistic feedback, are influenced by their foreign language anxiety in classrooms. Corrective feedback was provided to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who were homogeneous with regard to their proficiency during task-based interactions between learners and their interlocutors. Learners' perceptions of corrective feedback were subsequently collected via stimulated recall interviews. Learners' perceptions were classified as noticing the gap, recognized as corrective, and other. Learners were also classified as low- and high-anxiety learners according to scores they obtained in an anxiety questionnaire. The analysis of learners' perceptions along with their anxiety level indicated that the learners with lower anxiety were more successfully able to notice the gap between their erroneous utterances and target-like forms or recognize as corrective both the recasts and metalinguistic feedback.