Oral Corrective Feedback: Teacher’s Selection in Actual Practices

In coherent of an implementation of Common European Framework Research (CEFR) to enhance the English proficiency among the graduates, this study investigates one of the alternatives that can be applied by the language teachers to help the students especially low level groups to improve their English proficiency, namely Corrective Feedback (CF). The types and timing of CF used in the higher education language classrooms are investigated simultaneously. The types of CF (explicit and implicit) and timing of CF (online and offline) was the central focus of this study and four language teachers were observed. In order to discover the real practice of language instructors in their language classrooms, 16 hours of class observations was done. It was found out that even the language teachers frequently used explicit correction and recast in providing CF, they also tend to vary their types of CF to the students. It showed that they were all aware of the using types of CF in their language classrooms; however, most of them chose not to correct all their students’ oral errors. In terms of the timing of CF, Offline CF or delayed feedback was the preference timing used by the teachers. This finding indicated that the oral CF also tends to receive offline timing. All in all, the findings of this study is important to be understood by the language teachers to enlighten them on the importance of CF as the platform to supply feedback to the low level graduates (A1 to A2 level) to improve their proficiency for the sake of L2 development.