The Effect of Oral Corrective Feedback on Beginner and Low Intermediate Students’ Speaking Achievement

Oral corrective feedback (CF) and its subsequent impact on learning are main areas of current research on language learning and have attracted a lot of attention. There is a considerable amount of research investigating corrective feedback and error. What has not been researched extensively yet and is the focus of this study, is the effect of oral corrective feedback on students’ speaking achievement in Iranian schools. To this end, 370 Iranian EFL learners were chosen through multistage cluster sampling. Male students in Junior high schools of Zanjan city (n= 7936) were considered as the total size of the population being studied. They were in the seventh and ninth grades of Iranzamin, Sama, and Baharestan junior high schools in Zanjan-Iran. Cambridge Proficiency Test was used in order to have homogeneous groups. In the pretest the school speaking test was employed to measure their speaking skill. After six weeks of treatment, the speaking test was administered as a posttest. According to results, there were significant differences between the speaking mean scores in the posttest compared with the pretest; therefore, it was concluded that the oral corrective feedback had a positive effect on students’ speaking achievement. Pedagogical implications were extracted to assist English language instructors to be aware of the usefulness and value of the different kinds of oral corrective feedback, to effectively establish the necessary activities in the classroom, and to successfully supply the students with the appropriate kind of oral corrective feedback.