Oral metalinguistic feedback

The current study was performed to investigate the impact of metalinguistic oral and written corrective feedback on learners’ process writing ability through virtual learning environment. To this aim, a total of 66 Iranian EFL students in Shahrekord University participated in the study. To conduct the study, a sample of IELTS expository writing (Writing Task 1) was administered to all participants for homogeneity purposes. Then, each of the two classes was divided into two parts, and each was randomly assigned to one of the four comparison groups (oral metalinguistic feedback, written metalinguistic feedback, oral metalinguistic + error logs, and written metalinguistic + error logs). Next, the writing pretest (a process writing task) was given to participants prior to instruction. The treatment lasted for eight weeks, and then process writing posttest was administered. The results revealed that all groups made progress from pretest to posttest. However, no significant difference was found among the four types of metalinguistic corrective feedback. The implications of the findings are discussed throughout the paper.

The researchers in the current study aimed to explore the impact of metalinguistic corrective feedback and recasts on learners’ process writing ability through virtual learning environment. To this aim, a total of 63 Iranian EFL learners were selected and arranged in four groups (metalinguistic feedback, metalinguistic + error logs, recasts, and recasts + error logs). To conduct the study, an expository writing task selected from IELTS task 1 was administered to all participants as the pretest. The treatment lasted for eight weeks, and then the process writing posttest was administered. The main focus of the writing task was process writing and passive voice was selected as the target structure. The topics for pretest and posttest were selected with a lot of care, so that they could lend themselves to process writing, and would evoke the use of passive structure. The data were analyzed via paired sample t-test, Wilcoxon Signed Rank Test and one-way ANOVA. Based on the findings, though all groups significantly improved from pre- to posttest, no significant difference was found among the four groups as a result of being exposed to four types of corrective feedback. The findings offer implications for university EFL learners, professors, and material developers.