Teachers’ Beliefs on Oral Corrective Feedback for Young EFL Learners : Lärares uppfattningar om muntligt rättande feedback för unga elever i engelskundervisningen

Abstract: When supporting students’ language development, English as a Foreign Language (EFL) teachers use different scaffolding methods, such as Oral Corrective Feedback (OCF). This method’s purpose is to assist learners’ oral language skills, and there are various strategies that can be utilised in an input providing or output prompting manner. The aim of this study is to investigate Swedish EFL teachers in K-3 regarding their preferences for OCF strategies, the challenges they face in implementing these strategies, as well as adapting them to their teaching context. In order to examine this phenomenon, data was collected through conducting semi-structured interviews with teachers as participants. The results indicate that Recast is the most prevalent approach, whereas output prompting strategies pose the greatest difficulty for teachers. One of the output prompting strategies that were frequently mentioned as the least preferred was Metalinguistic Feedback. Moreover, teachers tend to adapt their OCF strategies and sometimes even choosing to not correct their students at all, depending onthe learning context and the individual student attributes. In comparison to previous studies conducted in other countries, different strategies were preferred such as Explicit Correction, which teachers in Sweden tend to refrain from using. However, the beliefs regarding output prompting OCF strategies were similar. Overall, teachers believe that providing OCF is an effective method for scaffolding young learners’ language development in the EFL classroom.