On the Relationship between EFL Learners’ SocioEconomic Status and their Attitudes toward Oral Corrective Feedback: A MixedMethod Study

Although many studies have focused on the language learners’ beliefs and attitudes regarding error correction, less has been done to investigate whether and how student characteristics influence their preferences. The present investigation explores how socioeconomic status affects the error correction views of 140 upperintermediate/advanced students, ranging from 23 to 31, in an EFL context. The participants’ social class was determined by MacArthur scale of subjective socioeconomic status. A questionnaire and a followup interview were employed to obtain the students’ overall preferences about different aspects of oral corrective feedback (OCF). The results showed that the students unanimously favored teachers as the best provider of feedback and highly expected both local and global errors to be treated; nevertheless, whereas middleclass students would rather their errors to be corrected at the end of the class while the teacher addressed the whole class, highclass students did not mind if teachers corrected them individually as soon as they finished speaking. Besides, although predominantly the students preferred direct error correction, highclass students had a more positive view toward elicitation and selferror correction in general. The findings of this study highlight the influence of language learners’ socioeconomic status on how they expect their teachers to treat their oral errors.