Experienced and Novice Language Teachers’ Beliefs about Corrective Feedback

The present study attempts to uncover language teachers’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback. It also explores the role of teachers’ experiences in their choice of error correction techniques. To achieve the purpose of the study, 137 foreign language teachers were asked to fill out the developed questionnaire and follow-up interviewed were conducted with 10 teachers, five novice and experienced teachers. The obtained results were analyzed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The results of descriptive analysis indicated that didactic recast, elicitation and conversational recast were among the most preferred oral correction strategies employed by the teachers. Teachers had different opinions and reasons regarding their favorite corrective feedback type. To examine whether teachers’ experiences affect their choice of a particular oral corrective feedback independent sample t-tests were run. It was found that the experienced teachers preferred conversational and didactic recast and metalinguistic cues whereas the novice teachers held more optimistic views about explicit correction, elicitation, metalinguistic explanations, clarification request, repetition, and paralinguistic feedback. The results of the follow-up interviews showed that novice teachers regarded direct corrective feedbacks as more effective since they are more noticeable and therefore can assist students to learn from their errors. Conversely, experienced teachers gave more importance to learners’ affects and emotions, considering emotions and learning to be interweaved and negative emotions hinder learning. Teacher education programs should therefore assist both novice and experienced practitioners to examine their own belief system and to realize the nature of errors and corrective feedback, diversity of contexts, individual differences in learning.