Fostering Foreign Writing Accuracy through Teachers’ Scaffolding of the Iranian Learners: The Case of Gender

The present study attempted to compare teacher’s corrective feedback on the intermediate EFL male and female learners in L2 writing accuracy. To this aim, 45 out of 65 EFL students participated in this study. They were selected through an Oxford Placement Test (OPT) among thirty learners. After giving OPT, 45 intermediate learners who scored one SD above and below the mean were excluded from the study. Three groups were selected: 15 male learners, 15 female learners and 15 male and female learners in the control group. The instrument was writing pre-and post-tests. Two experimental groups had teacher-student interaction conferencing for their classrooms. The conferences were based on the Aljaafreh and Lantolf’s regulatory scale (1994) in conferencing session. The learners’ errors were dealt with three grammatical structures: a) articles (a – an – the -Ɵ), b) past tense, and c) past progressive. In two weeks later, both of experimental groups revised their writing tasks. The result of this study was that interactional corrective feedback improved learners’ writing accuracy. The improvement of language learners in writing accuracy was appeared in the number and the length of interactional turns. Moreover, the result indicated that three groups had significant difference and the first null hypothesis of the study was rejected. Moreover, the male learners outperformed than female group in the interactional turns, but there was no significant difference between male and female learners in interactional turns. This study provided few implications for language teachers and curriculum developers such as providing interactional practices among language learners and teachers.