EFL TEACHERS’ BELIEFS ABOUT ORAL CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK AND THEIR FEEDBACK-PROVIDING PRACTICES ACROSS LEARNERS’ PROFICIENCY LEVELS

The present study investigated EFL teachers’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback (CF), their CF-provision practices across elementary and intermediate levels, and their beliefs-practices correspondence. To this end, the researchers conducted a semi-structured interview with the teachers and went on an overall forty-hour observation of their classrooms across both levels. The findings revealed that there was a significant difference in the teachers’ employment of CF strategies across the two levels with more frequent presence of explicit correction, elicitation, metalinguistic clues, clarification request, and repetition at elementary level. Moreover, it was demonstrated that the teachers did not differentiate in their focus on morpho-syntactic, phonological, and lexical errors at both levels. The results further highlighted some areas of belief-practice mismatch in teachers’ sensitivity to students’ errors, their employment of different CF strategies, use of explicit and implicit CF, application of immediate and delayed CF, correction of global and local errors, focus on different linguistic targets, and reliance on self, peer, and teacher correction. The paper concludes with some pedagogical implications.