Self-correction among Iranian EFL Learners: An Investigation into their Preferences for Corrective Feedback

Abstract

This article reports on the self-correction of Iranian EFL learners, their preferences regarding corrective feedback and the speech act through which they correct their own mistakes. The participants were 160 EFL learners from different language institutes, who have been selected from females and males, adults and teenagers and three different proficiency levels- starter, intermediate and advanced. A questionnaire was designed which proposed a situation where a mistake is made. Based on the frequency and percentage of the options selected by the participants, the provided answers were analyzed and the influence of age, gender and proficiency level on the speech act of correction was discussed in detail. The obtained results suggested that Iranian EFL learners prefer self-correction to teacher and peer correction when they themselves notice a mistake in their utterances.