The Effect of Oral Interactive Feedback on the Accuracy and Complexity of EFL Learners’ Writing Performance: Uptake and Retention

The role of teacher-student interaction and collaboration in solving linguistic problems has recently been in the center of SLA research. Accordingly, this study investigated the effect of Oral Interactive Feedback (OIF) on the accuracy and complexity of Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ writing. After ensuring the homogeneity using Preliminary English Test (PET), the researchers randomly assigned 50 sophomores into OIF group and Explicit Feedback (EF) group, with 25 students in each of them. The participants in the OIF group received oral interactive feedback, including elicitation and metalinguistic clues, on their written errors, while those in the EF group received oral explicit correction on their written errors. Data collection was based on immediate revisions of compositions and a post-test. Using ANCOVA, the researchers found that the OIF group outperformed the EF group in terms of both accuracy and complexity in both revised compositions and post-test. The findings from the study may encourage language teachers’ further use of OIF, using elicitation and metalinguistic clues, in treating EFL learners’ errors in written discourse.