Matches and mismatches between efl teachers’ and students’ preferences for corrective feedback in english speaking classes at a Vietnamese university

142 L.T.Huong / VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, Vol.36, No.1 (2020) 142-155
MATCHES AND MISMATCHES BETWEEN EFL 
TEACHERS’ AND STUDENTS’ PREFERENCES FOR 
CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK IN ENGLISH SPEAKING 
CLASSES AT A VIETNAMESE UNIVERSITY
Luu Thi Huong*
Faculty of Foreign Languages, Hanoi Pedagogical University No. 2 
Xuan Hoa, Phuc Yen, Vinh Phuc, Vietnam
Received 10 December 2019 
Revised 15 January 2020; Accepted 14 February 2020
Abstract: This study aimed at examining matches or mismatches between teachers’ and students’ 
preferences regarding different types of corrective feedback in EFL (English as a foreign language) 
speaking classrooms at a Vietnamese university. Observation and two parallel questionnaires adapted from 
Katayama (2007) and Smith (2010) were used to gather data from five EFL teachers and 138 English-
majored students. Multiple findings pertaining to each research question were revealed. Overall, the 
results indicated that while there were some areas of agreement between teachers and students, important 
mismatches in their opinions did occur.
Keywords: oral corrective feedback, matches, mismatches, EFL students and teachers
1. Introduction1 
In learning and teaching foreign languages 
context, making errors is an indispensable 
part of the learning process. Corder (1967) 
argues that errors truly reveal the learner’s 
underlying knowledge of the language and 
at a certain stage they reflect the transitional 
competence of learners. Undoubtedly, finely 
appropriate corrective feedback assists 
teachers to hamper their learners’ errors from 
getting fossilized and help them get progress 
along their interlanguage continuum. The 
correction of errors, hence, has also been a 
crucial part of language acquisition. 
A number of empirical studies have been 
carried out to stress the effectiveness of giving 
feedback to students. Poulos and Mathony 
(2008) indicated that the role of effective 
* Tel.: 84-989817356
 Email: luuthihuong@hpu2.edu.vn
feedback includes not only enhancing learning 
and teaching but also facilitating the transition 
between school and university. The feedback 
that students receive within their coursework 
is one of the most powerful influences on 
their learning process and it is central to the 
development of effective learning (Sadler, 
2010). Feedback has been defined as making a 
judgment about student accomplishment and 
learning, which when conveyed to the student 
informs them of how well they have performed 
(Talib, Naim, & Supie, 2015). Thus, teachers 
should be sensitive to students’ attitudes to 
language, particularly to error correction 
although it might be argued that learners’ 
preference may not be what is actually best 
for acquisition (Truscott, 1996). 
However, in reality, for most language 
teachers, there is a controversy with respect 
to the best ways to deal with students’ errors. 
There are language teachers who attempt 
to correct all of their students’ errors while 
143VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, Vol.36, No.1 (2020) 142-155
others only focus on correcting errors that are 
directly related to the topic being addressed 
in a particular lesson or errors that inhibit 
communication (Gumbaridze, 2013). From the 
researcher’s experiences and observations as a 
teacher of English, it can be seen that teachers 
seem not to pay attention to what students 
actually think and want about error correction 
in the teaching and learning process. Besides, 
the teacher-centered approach seems to be 
dominated in which teaching techniques seem 
to follow the one size fits all patterns (Mpho, 
2018). As a result, students’ learning progress 
has been affected, especially in the speaking 
domain. Thus, the author is motivated to 
carry out a study on teachers’ and students’ 
preferences for oral corrective feedback at a 
Vietnamese university. 
This study was conducted in an attempt to 
find answers for the following questions:
1. What oral corrective feedback do 
teachers actually give on students’ 
speaking in EFL speaking classrooms?
2. What types of corrective feedback 
do students and teachers in EFL speaking 
classrooms prefer?
3. To what extent does the teachers’ 
oral corrective feedback match the students’ 
preferences? 
2. Literature review
2.1. Oral corrective feedback
Regarding oral corrective feedback, 
several propositions from linguistics have 
been developed. 
Mackey, Gass and McDonough (2000) 
and Nishita (2004) cited by Yoshida (2008) 
have classified errors for corrective feedback 
such as morphosyntactic (word order, tense, 
conjugation, and articles are used incorrectly), 
phonological errors (mispronounced 
words), lexical errors (inappropriate use of 
vocabularies), semantic and pragmatic errors 
(misunderstanding a learner’s utterance). 
Ellis, Loewen, and Erlam (2006) (as cited in 
Méndez & Cruz, 2012) state that oral corrective 
feedback “takes the form of responses to 
learner utterances that contain error(s). The 
responses can consist of (a) an indication that 
an error has been committed, (b) provision 
of the correct target language form, or (c) 
metalinguistic information about the nature 
of the error, or any combination of there” (p. 
64). This is in agreement with Lyster, Saito 
and Sato (2013, p.1) as they described oral 
corrective feedback as the teachers’ responses 
to learners’ erroneous utterances. 
While a variety of classifications of the 
oral corrective feedback have been suggested, 
classification suggested by Lyster and Ranta 
(1977) who classified it into six kinds, namely 
repetition, elicitation, clarification request, 
recast, metalinguistic feedback, and explicit 
correction can be seen as preeminent. Yao 
(2000) in Méndez and Cruz (2012) also 
added another kind of corrective feedback 
– paralinguistic signal (body language) as 
teacher uses his/her facial expression (e.g.: 
rising eyebrows) or body movement (e.g.: 
move her/his head) to tell that the student has 
made error and is expected to self-correct.
In this study, Lyster and Ranta’s model 
(1997) and Yao’s in Méndez and Cruz (2012) 
were combined for collecting data on types of 
corrective feedback that students and teachers 
would prefer. Moreover, since the previous 
findings were done in different settings of 
research, there was a chance that this research 
revealed other types of error correction 
besides those seven types. 
2.2. The studies on teachers’ practices and 
students’ preferences for oral corrective 
feedback 
Extensive research reported by the studies 
comparing students’ and teachers’ corrective 
feedback preferences shows that considerable 
discrepancies and mismatches between the 
views of the two groups were found. 
Interesting discrepancies between student 
and teacher preferences were shown when Han 
and Jung (2007) explored patterns of corrective 
feedback and repair according to students’ 
144 L.T.Huong / VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, Vol.36, No.1 (2020) 142-155
English proficiency level. Yoshida (2008) used 
audio recordings of the classes and a stimulated 
recall interview with each participant to explore 
teachers’ choice and learners’ preference for 
corrective feedback types in Japanese in a 
foreign language classroom. The findings 
indicated that teachers chose recast because 
of the time limitation of classes and their 
awareness of learners’ cognitive styles. They 
also chose corrective feedback types such as 
elicitation and metalinguistic feedback when 
they realized that the learners who made 
erroneous utterances had the ability to work 
out correct forms on their own. Another study 
investigated the patterns of corrective feedback 
and learner repair present in advanced-level 
adult EFL classrooms and examined both 
teacher and student preferences regarding that 
feedback (Lee, 2013). The results revealed that 
the most frequent type of corrective feedback 
was recast, which generated 92.09% learner 
repair. These findings corroborate Saeb’s (2017) 
findings. He explored Iranian EFL teachers’ 
and students’ perceptions and preferences for 
different amounts and types of oral corrective 
feedback. Two parallel questionnaires were 
used to gather quantitative and qualitative data 
from 28 teachers and 68 of their students. The 
results revealed significant differences between 
teachers’ and students’ perceptions about the 
amounts and types of corrective feedback 
and also about different types of errors to be 
corrected. 
It can be noted that the research to date 
has tended to focus on teachers’ opinions 
and preferences. However, few writers have 
been able to draw on any structured research 
into the opinions and preferences of students. 
Another gap is that most studies in the field 
of oral corrective feedback have been based 
on classroom observations, and no significant 
differences between what teachers do in the 
classroom to handle errors and what they believe 
they prefer have been clearly highlighted. 
Given the limited knowledge regarding errors 
and error correction, there is a likelihood that 
teachers themselves are unaware of how they 
deal with students’ errors or about the most 
effective and appropriate techniques to address 
students’ errors. Moreover, there certainly 
seems to be a gap between what students and 
teachers believe to constitute effective and 
useful types of corrective feedback. Such 
conflict of ideas may cause problems for the 
process of language learning and teaching. 
Another important research gap regarding 
corrective feedback is that the majority of 
research on feedback on second language 
classrooms has been conducted in the context 
of English as a Second Language classrooms 
(Lyster & Panova, 2002). Unfortunately, few 
studies have been conducted about how tertiary 
EFL learners respond to different kinds of 
teachers’ corrective feedback. The situation is 
similar in Vietnam where this research branch 
seems to be unattractive to researchers. It has 
been difficult to identify documented studies 
on the relationship between teachers’ and 
learners’ preferences for corrective feedback 
which are conducted on Vietnamese university 
EFL English-majored students. 
Such aforementioned gaps have motivated 
the researcher to bridge with her current 
paper. She desires to explore and compare 
Vietnamese students’ and teachers’ preferences 
for oral corrective feedback in EFL speaking 
classroom context in the present study. 
3. Methodology
3.1. Research design 
This research was quantitative in 
nature, which employed survey design. The 
observation was used to collect data about 
teachers’ practices and information about 
the teachers’ and students’ preferences for 
feedback was gathered using questionnaires. 
The result of the survey became a reference 
to determine what types of feedback the 
teachers believed to employ in response to 
students’ performances and what types of 
feedback that the students preferred. The 
quantitative approach was chosen because 
145VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, Vol.36, No.1 (2020) 142-155
clear documentation can be provided 
regarding the content and application of the 
survey instruments so that other researchers 
can assess the validity of the findings. 
Moreover, study findings can be generalized 
to the population about which information is 
required. However, it is true that quantitative 
study is expensive and time-consuming, and 
even the preliminary results are usually not 
available for a long period of time.
3.2. Research participants 
Five English teachers were invited 
to participate in this study. They are all 
Vietnamese with certain years of teaching 
speaking skills in the same faculty. All of 
them are teaching speaking skills for first-year 
students in the second term of the academic 
year. They are active female teachers and 
always willing to adopt new changes; 
therefore, they are willing to be a part of 
this research. Only 138 students agreed to 
participate in this study among which 15% of 
them were male and 85% were female with 
over 10 years of English learning experience. 
All of the participants were all selected by 
using convenience sampling technique. This 
technique was utilized because it was quite 
difficult to collect data from all population 
in a relatively short period of time. So, only 
those who voluntarily participated in the 
survey were selected as the sample. 
3.3. Research instruments 
3.3.1. Class observation 
The study focuses on teachers’ oral 
corrective feedback to students’ errors (teacher-
student interaction), classroom observation 
seems to be one of the most effective methods 
of collecting data. Observation, as the name 
reveals, is a way of collecting data through 
observing. The observation data collection 
method is classified as a participatory study 
because the researcher has to immerse herself 
in the setting where her respondents are 
while taking notes, recording or both. The 
observation sheet composes of two parts: 
general information and tally sheet. The general 
information is adapted from the Ullmann and 
Geva’s (1985) Target Language Observation 
Scheme. It contains general information about 
the observer, instructor of the class, date of 
observation, students’ year level, class, number 
of boys, number of girls, start time, finish time, 
and lesson topic. The second part was adapted 
from Nunan’s (1989) Classroom Observation 
Tally Sheet. The tally sheet is like a checklist, 
provides eight categories of feedback strategies 
expected in the classroom with clear explanation 
for each (See Appendix A). After being given 
the permission to conduct the research in five 
classes, 10 lectures of five teachers were audio-
recorded and transcribed. Each lesson lasted 
for 50 minutes. In the class, the lessons were 
structured as usual with maximum interaction 
between learners and the teacher. Learners did 
not know the reasons for the visit of the author 
so they acted normally. While observing the 
lessons, the author took notes of learners’ errors 
and the feedback provided by the teachers. 
3.3.2. Questionnaires for teachers and 
students 
A parallel questionnaire combined from 
Katayama (2007) and Smith (2010) and 
observation results were administered to 
students and teachers after the observation 
part was finished for one week. It consists 
of questions on students’ and teachers’ 
personal information in section A. Section 
B is preferences toward types of oral error 
corrective feedback which should be given by 
the teacher and students. The other questions 
seek to understand their opinions about the 
oral corrective feedback, responses to which 
were scored on a 5-point Likert scale (See 
Appendix B).
3.4. Data analysis
To scrutinize the frequency of corrective 
feedback types used in the classroom 
(Research Question 1), the audio-recorded 
classes in accordance with corrective feedback 
categories aforementioned in the Literature 
review part were analyzed. 
146 L.T.Huong / VNU Journal of Foreign Studies, Vol.36, No.1 (2020) 142-155
To examine the students’ and teachers’ 
corrective feedback preferences (Research 
Question 2), all eight of the declarative 
statements in Section 2 of the students’ and 
teachers’ surveys were used. The quantitative 
data obtained in the form of responses to the 
questionnaire were analyzed using the SPSS 
20.0 software package. 
To answer Research question 3, a one-
sample t-test was used to identify the matches 
or mismatches between the students’ and the 
teachers’ preferences for corrective feedback. 
Unfortunately, an independent t-test could 
not be exploited because of a big difference 
between the number of students and teachers 
(138 vs. 5). Hence, the mean value of the 
teachers’ preferences for that corrective 
feedback type is used as the test value in the 
one-sample t-test. 
4. Findings and discussion
4.1. Findings 
4.1.1. Oral corrective feedback strategies 
used by teachers in actual classrooms 
Data from observation showed that the 
common oral corrective feedback employed 
by the teachers mainly fell into seven different 
types of feedback strategies named repetition, 
explicit feedback, elicitation, clarification 
request, metalinguistic feedback, recast, and 
paralinguistic signal (body language), among 
which the use of clarification request and 
recast was dominant. This is demonstrated in 
Table 1.
Table 1. Frequency of oral corrective feedback in actual class hours
Feedback strategies T1 T2 T3 T4 T5 Frequency Rate (%)
Repetition 2 1 2 2 3 10 16.39%
Explicit feedback 3 1 0 1 0 5 8.20%
Elicitation 1 2 1 1 1 6 9.84%
Clarification request 5 2 4 2 3 16 26.23%
Meta-linguistic feedback 2 1 2 0 3 8 13.11%
Recast 5 2 4 1 3 15 24.59%
Paralinguistic signal 0 0 0 0 1 1 1.64%
Total 18 9 13 7 14 61 100%
It can be seen from Table 1 that the 
frequency of oral corrective feedback given by 
five teachers during 10 lessons varied strongly. 
Interestingly, there were several times when 
teachers did not even give any feedback on 
students’ oral errors, with 19 times of no error 
correction feedback of total 80 times students’ 
error occurred during 10 lessons observed. 
The seven types of corrective feedback were 
used by the teachers 61 times. Among the 
five teachers, T1 was the one who corrected 
the students most frequently with 18 times 
in total. T3 and T5 also utilized feedback 
many times, 13 and 14 respectively, whereas 
T4 hardly used corrective feedback in her 
class, just only 7 times in the same length of 
time. Moreover, the practices of giving error 
correction types applied by five teachers were 
strikingly similar. Although the frequency 
of error correction feedback used varied, 
clarification and recast seemed to be the most 
preferred types of all five at a rate of 26.23% 
and 24.59% correspondingly. Meanwhile, 
explicit feedback, metalinguistic feedback, and 
paralinguistic signal were hardly employed in 
the class hours. The explicit feedback was used 
8.2% when correcting students’ mistakes, while 
metalinguistic feedback was utilized at the rate 
of 13.11%. Especially, paralinguistic signal 
was hardly applied when errors occurred, as 
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four out of five teachers (T1, T2, T3, T4) never 
used paralinguistic signal to give feedback on 
students’ oral performances. 
Overall, these observations demonstrate 
the prevalence of clarification request and 
recast in these classrooms. 
4.1.2. Students’ and teachers’ preferred 
types of corrective feedback in EFL speaking 
classrooms 
When it comes to teachers’ preferences 
concerning feedback, Table 2 presents the 
most important results of this part of the study.
Table 2. Teacher’s preferences for types of oral corrective feedback
Feedback strategies Mean Std. Deviation
No corrective feedback 1.6 .894
Repetition 3.2 .837
Explicit feedback 4.4 .548
Elicitation 2.6 1.517
Clarification request 4.0 1.225
Meta-linguistic feedback 5.0 .000
Recast 4.6 .548
Paralinguistic signal 1.4 .548
These statistical results reaffirm the 
frequency measurement from the observations 
except one type – explicit feedback. All of 
them (M=5.0) most preferred metalinguistic 
feedback but only eight times of it were done 
in actual class hours. Repetition was conducted 
ten times by teachers and the result from the 
questionnaire confirmed it as the preferred type 
(M=3.2). Explicit feedback, recast, clarification 
request were also their choices (M=4.4, 4.6, and 
4.0 respectively.) However,