The impact of corrective feedback on learners’ written productions

Abstract

This study seeks to explore the causes behind the difficulties that EFL students at Mohamed Khider Biskra University encounter in writing and to demonstrate the important place that corrective feedback holds in the teaching of writing. It attempts to demonstrate some frequent problems often found in the writings of EFL students at Biskra University from both interlingual and intralingual angles. It tries also to show that the role of teachers’ error correction is decisively substantial in fostering students’ written performance though its importance has been strongly debated for decades. The first hypothesis raised in this study states that interlingual and intralingual interference may be two main causes of errors which most students produce at various stages in writing and the second hypothesis suggests that if teachers provide effective corrective feedback, they may promote students’ written production. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, the research collects the data first by means of teachers’ questionnaires distributed to all teachers of written expression in the Branch of English Studies in the Department of Foreign Languages at Mohamed Khider Biskra University. Then, the essays of thirty EFL students were analyzed to identify, describe and classify the different types of errors and finally diagnose their sources. The last means of data collection was a pre-experimental design in which a study group was exposed to an instructional treatment in the form of permanent and clear corrective feedback in order to observe the progress in the students’ posttest. The results reveal that there is a great necessity to identify and diagnose the factors that cause students’ recurrent errors in writing in order to be able to respond to them thoughtfully by implementing effective corrective feedback.