The Influence of Explicit Written Corrective Feedback on Enhancing Linguistic Accuracy of EFL Learners at Different Proficiency Levels

Abed, Fatemeh; Abadikhah, Shirin; Ahmadpour Kasgary, Zahra

doi:10.22080/iselt.2025.29160.1099

The Influence of Explicit Written Corrective Feedback on Enhancing Linguistic Accuracy of EFL Learners at Different Proficiency Levels

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

¹ MA in TEFL‎, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar & PhD Candidate of IAU, Qaemshahr, Iran

² Department of English Language and Literature, Faculty of Peresian Literature and Foreign Languages, University of Mazandaran, Babolsar, Iran

10.22080/iselt.2025.29160.1099

Abstract

The current study aims to investigate the influence of explicit written corrective ‎feedback on improving linguistic accuracy of EFL learners at different ‎proficiency levels. Two groups of elementary and intermediate students (n=18) ‎were selected using convenience sampling‎. The participants were administered a pre-test, four treatments and a post-test ‎over six sessions. During the pre-test, they completed a picture description task, a multiple-choice ‎test and a cloze task. The second to fourth sessions involved two practice sessions, which followed the same format as the pre-test. After practice sessions, they were given written corrective feedback followed by ‎oral explanation on the same week. The post-test, identical to the pre-test, was administered during the final session. The findings indicated that the high proficiency learners did not show a significant change with the written corrective feedback. In contrast, the low proficiency learners demonstrated significant improvements in both gain scores from pre-test to post-test and linguistic accuracy rate. It can be suggested that teachers should tailor their feedback strategies according ‎to proficiency levels‎; while for low-proficient learners, providing explicit written corrective feedback in grammatical features might be beneficial, for high-proficient learners, alternative instructional approaches, such as encouraging autonomous learning, might be more effective.

Keywords

Main Subjects

Copyright © 2025 The Author(s). Published by the Faculty of Persian Literature and Foreign Languages at the University of Mazandaran. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0) license.

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