The Effect of Individual/Group Focused vs. Unfocused Feedback on EFL Learners’ Pragmatic Performance in terms of Accuracy and Fluency
Keywords:
focused/unfocused corrective feedback, second language writing, accuracy, fluency, pragmatic competence, speech act of requestAbstract
This research investigated the feasible effects of individual/group focused versus unfocused feedback on EFL learners’ pragmatics achievements in terms of accuracy and fluency. To do this, 60 female intermediate level English students were divided into four experimental groups and asked to write request letter based on the instruction they had received. In order to check the homogeneity of the participants in terms of their level of proficiency, an Oxford Placement Test was administered. Afterwards, to estimate the participants’ speech act performance before the experiment in each group, a pre-test was used. During treatment sessions, the writings were corrected, individual/group focused and unfocused feedbacks were provided, and then they were handed back to the students to notice the errors. To assess the pragmatic knowledge of the participants regarding the speech act of request in each group after the treatment, a post-test was administered. To reach more reliable data, two raters corrected the participants’ responses on pretest and posttest. Two repeated-measures two-way ANOVA and MANOVA were used to analyse the data. The results indicated individual/group focused and unfocused group significantly benefited from the provision of feedback. Besides, limitations of the study and suggestions for further research are both addressed at the end of the paper.
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