Preferences regarding written corrective feedback [WCF] of first year students of an english pedagogy program

Abstract

Written corrective feedback strategies have been widely researched, and the latest findings suggest them as effective techniques to promote language acquisition (Bitchener & Knoch, 2008; Ortiz, 2016; Muñoz & Sáez, 2019). However, one of the unanswered matters corresponds to individual and contextual aspects that have not been taken into consideration (Chen et al., 2016). This quantitative research with a quasi-experimental approach is aimed at determining the effectiveness of written feedback when the treatment is adjusted to learners’ preferences. The sample is composed of students of pedagogy in English from a local university divided into 4 experimental groups and a control group. For collecting data, different instruments were designed such as a survey to identify learners’ preferences about feedback, various writing tasks and a pre- and a post-test. The results show that participants highly value error correction, especially of grammatical errors. They favour strategies with grammatical explanation and prefer teachers’ correction and focused treatment. Besides, according to these findings, adjusting feedback strategies to students’ preferences may not increase the effectiveness of those techniques; on the contrary, they seem to have a more significant impact when assigned.