The effectiveness of written corrective feedback and the impact Lao learners’ beliefs have on uptake

This article presents the results of a study examining the effectiveness of written corrective feedback (CF) on the simple past tense and the impact beliefs may have on students’ uptake of the feedback they receive. A seven-week study was carried out with 42 advanced EFL learners in Vientiane, Laos. Students’ beliefs about written CF were first collected, after which they were assigned to either the control group or to groups that received written CF according to their feedback preferences. Students produced four pieces of writing (pre-test, post-test and two delayed post-tests) that responded to four different narrative prompts. The targeted grammatical feature was the simple past tense. The study found that the three feedback groups showed significant improvement in the use of the targeted feature while the control group did not. Furthermore, the results seemed to indicate that beliefs might have impacted on the extent to which the Lao students improved their linguistic accuracy because the students who received their preferred type of feedback were more successful at eliminating the targeted errors than the ones who did not.