EFL Written Corrective Feedback: Investigating The Beliefs And Practice Of Senior Two Novice Teachers

The corrective feedbacks on oral and written English have gained much attention over the past decades.Many of the studies highlighted the different effectiveness of various corrective feedbacks and teachers’ beliefs towards corrective feedback.As the researchers were more motivated to explain teachers’ real performance in terms of written CF,the studies on the relationship between teachers’ beliefs and practice received considerable attention(Grotjahn,1991).Some of the studies found that there were mismatches between teachers’ beliefs and practice,and further tried to dig out the in-depth attributions to the misalignments.Ferris(2014)pointed out in his study that novice teachers usually felt confused when giving feedback on ESL writing and this finding echoed in the schools where the present study was carried out.The novice teachers in the schools confirmed that they were frustrated by the unpleasant experience of providing written CF.Hence,the novice teachers of Grade 2 in two senior high schools were selected to be research subjects in this study.This study adopted both quantitative and qualitative research methods,using the instruments such as online questionnaires investigation,interviews via We-chat video telephone,and the samples of teachers’ written CF from five assignments collected within two months to answer the following research questions: 1)What are the novice teachers’ beliefs of written CF forms,focuses,and extent respectively? 2)How do the novice teachers provide written CF in terms of feedback forms,focuses and extent? 3)Do the novice teachers’ beliefs stated match or mismatch with their written CF practice? If not,what are the possible reasons behind the phenomenon?The major findings suggested that: 1)The teachers believed both direct and indirect forms of written CF were beneficial to students’ language developments and with equal significance.As to the beliefs towards specific forms of written CF,the teachers claimed direct correction and circling/underlining of written CF were adopted most commonly.Besides,the teachers believed that they focused on both “local issues” and “global issues”,and their preference on specific error types could be ranked as follows: grammar> content > mechanics > lexical expression > organization > ideas.In addition,the teachers investigated all agreed that they employed focused written CF more often;2)However,in the practice,the novice teachers in this study employed more indirect forms of written CF.The most common form of providing written CF was underlining/circling,while the form of indicating number of errors within a sentence was absent from teachers’ practice.Besides,teachers focused more on “local issues”,mainly were grammatical errors,and no written CF on ideas was provided by teachers.In addition,81% of written CF from five teachers were focused;3)Findings above indicated that except for written CF extent,the novice teachers’ beliefs for feedback forms and feedback focuses were incongruous with their practice.Regarding the misalignments in written CF forms,two specific mismatches were observed in this study.The first mismatch was the distribution of direct and indirect written CF,which arose from time constrains,students’ negative responses,and teachers’ undesirable perception to effectiveness of written CF.The second mismatch was the absence of some indirect form in practice,which was mainly led by the inadequacy of previous training.As to the misalignments in written CF focuses,also two specific mismatches were noticed in this study.The first mismatch lied in the distribution of written CF on “global” and “local” issues,which was caused by the conflict between mainstream quality-oriented criteria and traditional examination culture.The second mismatch was the absence of written CF on ideas,which concerned with the limited ideas required in test material,and the novice teachers’ misunderstanding to written CF on “ideas”.In light of the findings above,some implications were concluded: 1)It is advisable to offer more practical and specialized training on giving written CF to novice teachers;2)Teachers are supposed to take students’ individual differences into consideration when giving written CF;and 3)Regular reflections are recommended.