ESP Teachers’ Oral Corrective Feedback on Medical Students’ Reading Comprehension

Abstract

Oral corrective feedback (OCF) plays a crucial role in learners’ language development, but not many studies have been done with regard to OCF in students’ performance and their uptake in ESP classes, especially in medical schools. This study aimed to provide insights into strategies ESP instructors utilize to deliver OCF to their students’ reading performance as well as students’ uptake. For this purpose, a descriptive study using a qualitative approach was run, and data were collected from observations of four ESP teachers and one hundred twenty-four students. The recorded data from five sessions of each teacher equaled a total of 1800 minutes. The findings showed that from seven types of OCF, teachers provided five types: explicit correction, recast, explicit correction with metalinguistic explanation, clarification request, and repetition. Among them, explicit correction and recast were used the most. Also, results revealed that explicit correction was used more by male teachers (80%) whereas recast was used more by female teachers (85%). Also, the findings evidenced that repetition, recast, and explicit correction were effective in helping students understand their errors. Implications are suggested for the use of OCF to help understand learners’ expectations of CF in ESP instruction.