EFL university students' attitudes toward teacher feedback and its significance

Writing is one of the four essential skills of language and should be improved in the course of learning a language. To enable this improvement, students' progress in L2 and foreign language writing should be supported through agents including teachers, peers, interactive course books, and the internet. Writing in L2 may be regarded as a challenging task for many students, and thus they may not feel properly equipped to write in a foreign language. This hesitancy on the part of students can be overcome through teacher feedback. However, teacher feedback can also cause students to feel inadequate when writing in L2. This study investigated the attitudes of university students learning English as a Foreign Language (EFL) toward teacher feedback, and tried to ascertain these students' preferences for teacher feedback through questionnaires and interviews. The purpose of the study was to determine whether teacher feedback affects students' writing in L2, and to see whether there is a difference between male and female students' writing in L2. Moreover, this study aimed to determine what kinds of teacher feedback were preferred by the EFL university students. The outcomes of the analysis showed that a great number of the participants had a positive image of writing in L2 and receiving teachers' corrective feedback in L2 writing classes. It was also revealed that gender did not have a statistically significant effect on students' attitudes toward teacher feedback. Finally, our study discovered that most of the participants preferred implicit teacher feedback on the first draft, and expected explicit teacher feedback on the final draft. In conclusion, it can be said that teachers' corrective feedback does not slow the process of learning to write in English, and, furthermore, both male and female participants expect to receive teachers' corrective feedback. Key Words: Feedback, Writing Skill, Foreign Language Learning, Error Correction, Writing in L2