The Effects of Implicit, Explicit, and Emergent Oral Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners' Accuracy, Fluency, and Attitude

Abstract

In this study it was attempted to investigate whether different CF strategies, including implicit, explicit, and emergent CF, can differently affect the accuracy and fluency of oral production among Iranian EFL learners. In addition, it explored the learners' attitudes towards how they felt about the CF types applied in the classroom. For these purposes, the researchers selected 54 homogeneous pre-intermediate learners on the basis of the PET results and randomly assigned them into three experimental groups: the Implicit group, the Explicit group, and the Emergent group. While the Implicit and Explicit groups received just implicit feedback and explicit correction for their erroneous oral production, respectively, the Emergent group took CF from implicit to explicit. Oral narrative and picture description tasks and semi-structured interviews were used to collect the quantitative and qualitative data for the study. The results of inferential statistics indicated significant differences among the feedback types in both past-tense and future-tense accuracy. Moreover, the Emergent group had a better performance compared with the other groups with respect to accuracy. However, no significant difference was revealed among the feedback types with respect to fluency. The results of the content analysis also indicated that the learners mostly preferred to receive emergent feedback and participate in the process of error correction. The findings of this study can raise researchers', teachers', and teacher trainers' awareness of the function of various CF types.