A Qualitative Investigation of Iranian EFL Students' Attitude toward and Cognition of their Teachers' Written Corrective Feedback

Researchers studying the impact of feedback have traditionally compared groups of students who received different sorts of feedback. However, because there will be individual answers to any educational treatment within a group of students, and the impacts of feedback can vary drastically even among participants who received the same type of feedback in the same investigation, the current study used a qualitative case study approach and techniques such as narrative construction and qualitative comparative analysis to see students’ attitude and cognition toward their teachers’ written corrective feedback. Eight participants were chosen through purposeful sampling. The participants were IELTS preparation learners from different online classes. The interview questions were adapted from Silver and Lee (2007). Their assignment and the feedback received by the instructor serves the main data of this study. Moreover, an individual narrative profile was conducted for each student. Three different texts from each learner were collected. The texts were five-paragraph essay type writings, each provided by written feedback including correction tips on linguistic aspects of their texts. The results showed that learners are mostly willing to receive positive, organized, constructive, encouraging, detailed and clean feedbacks. Feedbacks in which the comments and instructions are clear are valued by the learners. Furthermore, teachers’ make sure that the technical words used in the feedback are understandable to all the learners.