The relationship between EFL primary school teachers’ beliefs and classroom practices of oral corrective feedback

Abstract

In the realm of second/foreign language (FL) acquisition, it remains controversial whether teachers should provide corrective feedback (CF), which refers to any indication to learners that their use of the target language is incorrect. Whilst some researchers have argued that EFL learners learn from their own mistakes after receiving CF, others have challenged the effectiveness of providing CF, warning against its negative effect on English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ confidence and motivation. This debate has been extensively studied in the field of written corrective feedback, but less in relation to oral corrective feedback (OCF), particularly in EFL settings and with young learners, who are at the beginning of their foreign language development and may need to be made aware of their pronunciation and grammar errors. This study addressed this research issue by investigating primary school teachers’ beliefs and practices regarding OCF, seeking to identify their relationship and any factors that may affect this relationship. This study was an exploratory multi-case study. Several direct and indirect methods were used to collect quantitative and qualitative data from four purposively sampled cases, including lesson observations, questionnaires, stimulated recall sessions and semi-structured interviews. These data were triangulated and allowed comparisons among the four teachers (cases) to identify any factors that affected the relationship between their beliefs and practices. The results revealed a rather complex relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices. First, the teachers regarded OCF provision as important and effective in facilitating EFL development, but believed that it was not necessary to address all students’ errors. Instead, they only corrected ‘important’ errors, including those related to the grammatical focus of the lessons or phonological errors that affected meaning. However, in practice, the four teachers did not always follow their beliefs, as they corrected nearly all students’ errors and the types of OCF they provided did not match their preferred ones. Contextual factors, including school policy, student characteristics and real-time oral interactions in practice, were the main factors that mediated the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practices. These results were incorporated into Borg’s framework of teacher cognition to reconceptualise the various factors and their relationships in the field of OCF provision in primary EFL settings. The results of this study add to the limited empirical evidence of OCF provision in EFL primary classrooms, in which the needs of young learners must be taken into consideration. They also contribute to the debate about OCF provision, as it was observed that teachers providing OCF may still align with their practices of Communicative Language Teaching (CLT), especially when using certain types of OCF that can sustain teacher-student interactions. Considering the participating teachers’ limited knowledge of OCF, teacher training should be provided to help them make informed decisions about OCF in real-time practice. Finally, it may be useful for teachers to self-reflect on their beliefs and practices and the mediating factors between them, to put their beliefs into practice in class.