The Effect of the Corrective Feedback on Iranian EFL Learners’ Speaking Accuracy and Breakdown Fluency

The purpose of the current study was to explore the effects of different corrective feedback (CF) conditions on Iranian EFL learners’ spoken general accuracy and breakdown fluency and their relationships. Consequently, four preintermediate intact classes were randomly selected as the control, delayed explicit metalinguistic CF, extensive recast, and intensive recast groups; these groups participated in spoken reproduction tasks for six sessions and their errors were treated differently. Then, the data was transcribed, coded for accuracy and fluency, and analyzed. The results indicated that the different CF conditions had insignificant effects on the number of error free Analysis of Speech (AS)units, as an index of the spoken general accuracy. Considering the fluency, although different CF conditions had insignificant effects on the number of pauses the participants produced, it had a significant effect on the whole number of pauses; there was a significant correlation between participants’ pauses and the whole number of pauses, with a medium effect size. The correlations between the general accuracy and breakdown fluency of all groups were negative and insignificant. In addition, different CF conditions had insignificant effects on the relationship between the accuracy and fluency. These findings suggest that there is no tradeoff between spoken general accuracy and breakdown fluency. In addition, different CF conditions have insignificant effects on the EFL learners’ spoken general accuracy, breakdown fluency, and their relationships.