What feedback is perceived as useful? : The perceptions of Written Corrective Feedback among Swedish ESL teachers and students in Upper Secondary School

Abstract: Corrective feedback (CF) has received plenty of attention in the last decades. Researchers and linguists alike have debated the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (WCF) and it is an area of relevance for the ESL classroom. One aspect of WCF is teachers’ and students’ attitudes towards it. Despite this, little is known about how teachers and students perceive the usefulness of CF (Kim & Mostafa, 2021). Additionally, few of the previous studies have compared the two groups (Amrhein & Nassaji, 2010). For this reason, this study investigated the beliefs and perceptions of teachers and students of upper secondary schools in Sweden. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected by online survey questionnaire from 53 ESL upper secondary school students and 36 ESL upper secondary school teachers. The results indicate that while there were some similarities in perceptions, students tended to perceive plentiful feedback to be most useful, some students stating that knowing all the errors helped them improve. Teachers, on the other hand, tended to be more strategic with the WCF they give, focusing on major errors, and they tended to consider both the effects on the students as well as workload when judging the usefulness of WCF. Teacher and student opinions also differed regarding what types of feedback is seen as useful. Students perceived corrections of the errors as more useful, as that shows them what they did wrong, whereas teachers saw explanations of why there is an error as more useful as it makes the students think about how to fix it. On the other hand, teachers’ and students’ opinions showed no significant differences on what areas of a text they perceived feedback to be most useful on. Both teachers and students perceived corrective feedback on all areas of a text to be useful, with grammar feedback being the one both groups perceived to be the most useful. From a pedagogical perspective, this study emphasises the need for teacher and student expectations on WCF to be aligned, to each other as well as what has been empirically shown to be most useful.