Beliefs and practices of efl instructors on oral corrective feedback and students' perceptions

Error correction in foreign language speaking instruction has always been a controversial issue. Almost every researcher and teacher has an individual point of view or belief towards oral correction feedback (OCF). Besides, it was seen that teachers may rarely know about their actual oral error correction procedures in the classrooms. It is also needed to take into account of students' beliefs towards OCF. Therefore, the significance of the present study arises from these two gaps between students and teachers perception of OCF; and teachers' beliefs and practices. The main purpose of the study is to investigate the beliefs of both students and teachers towards OCF, and find out whether teachers' beliefs and actual OCF practices match. 107 students from a preparation school of a state university in Turkey and their six speaking course instructors participated in the study. For data collection, two questionnaires designed specially for students and instructors for investigating their beliefs towards OCF were applied. Speaking course instructors' practices were observed to be compared with the statistical data. The results of the study show that there are some conflicts between students and instructors in terms of OCF usage; and instructors' beliefs and practices show differences.