Student teachers’ beliefs on oral corrective feedback in English language teaching

Abstract

Oral Corrective Feedback (OCF) in a foreign language classroom is an essential factor for language learning because, according to Platt and Brooks (1994 Apud Shrum and Glisan, 2010), it helps students to make themselves understood and also in the development of strategies that help them to interact using the language. Taking into consideration the relation between theory and practice, Corrective Feedback (CF)’s importance and what student teachers might think about it, the questions that we aim to answer with this research are: (1) how OCF takes place in two different classroom settings, EFL and K-12, and (2) what are student teachers’ beliefs on it. For this research, two Letras-Inglês undergraduate student teachers who were taking the teaching practicum course at Universidade Federal do Ceará had two of their classes observed and videotaped. Then, the two student teachers answered some questions related to the use of OCF. The results show that there were more occurrences of OCF strategies in the K-12 school setting than in the EFL course, being explicit feedback the most used strategy. These findings seem to indicate that the student teachers tend to use explicit/direct strategies more than the implicit/indirect. Also, it suggests that the student teachers interviewed see recast as the most effective strategy while they see explicit correction as the least effective strategy. Also, they believe that students should not be over corrected, because it could lead them to be upset or afraid of speak. On the contrary, both student teachers see explicit correction (the OCF strategy they most used) as one strategy that “put the student on the spot”. Lastly, both of them consider displaying students’ mistakes on the board as an effective strategy of correction, even when it is the case of dealing with oral production