The English access course students’ views and preferences on corrective feedback at the University of Namibia

Abstract

Corrective feedback has for long been an area of interest to second language learning and teaching researchers. Most renowned researchers in this area, Lyster and Ranta (cited in Vasquez & Harvey, 2010) define corrective feedback as teachers’ feedback to learners’ erroneous or inappropriate utterances to provide correct forms, hints or clues to elicit learners’ reformulations of their errors or inappropriate utterances. Different studies carried out have been preoccupied with comparing CF techniques in terms of their effectiveness. Most revisited techniques are recasts and elicitation prompts. This study explores English Access Course (EAC) students’ perceptions on immediate oral feedback with an aim to find out their preferences, especially between recasts and prompts as corrective feedback techniques. This was a mixed-method study that collected data by means of interviews and questionnaires. The study comprised of 12 students registered for the (EAC) at the University of Namibia in the department of Language Centre. The study results reveal that students prefer recasts in terms of the affective states, but find elicitation prompts to be more effective in oral feedback than recasts in developing their proficiency in English.