Students' attitudes to teacher's oral feedback in EFL classroom

The purpose of this study is to explore the overall views and opinions of students regarding feedback in the preparatory classes of a high school. The study specifically was focused on the students' attitude towards oral feedback and aimed to find out what kinds of oral feedback are mostly used by the language teachers in EFL classrooms. The study also portrays how, where, when they want to receive feedback. Generally, all the themes worked here demonstrate how the students' attitude constitutes. Feedback is a valuable part of learning and teaching in EFL classrooms and has been studied in the previous researches in terms of written feedback and corrective feedback from the standpoints of both teacher and students. However, the issue of oral feedback's influence in students' attitude has been less studied in the literature. Therefore, this study comes out with the new knowledge on the issue and is significant in feedback field. The quantitative and the qualitative features of the study are because of the data gathering methods, which is a questionnaire including two open-ended questions and a statement, and also the observation of the lessons on the types of oral feedback given by the teacher. The equipment was the questionnaires of 109 preparatory students in a high school, and the recordings of the four lessons. The findings of the study display that students are eager to receive feedback as part of their learning process, and almost all of them were positive about feedback process. The classroom was the place the students received the feedback. The teachers provided feedback to the whole class at once, and the students were asked to what kind of oral feedback they would like to receive. The students' interest in communication led them to keep up with the necessary changes in speaking and pronunciation, and grammar as well. Oral feedback was supposed to point to the mistakes, or to assist decreasing the mistakes themselves. The students also think oral feedback is enhancing and motivating. The observations of the classes showed us that the explicit correction is the most frequently used type of oral feedback and the others are, respectively; praising, recasting, interactional feedback. The study had some limitations so the results should not be generalized universally. Nevertheless, this extensive study on oral feedback in the classroom provided insightful considerations about both the students' attitude and the types of the feedback the teachers use in the EFL classroom. It was also interesting to find out teachers' beliefs which are about the oral feedback.