Primary EFL teachers' oral corrective feedback in Vietnam: beliefs and practices

This study explores teachers’ beliefs and practices about oral corrective feedback in English as a foreign language (EFL) classrooms in primary schools in Vietnam. It is an interesting context to explore teacher cognition and practice because many teachers were actually trained as secondary teachers, but they are currently teaching at primary schools. The study was conducted at 6 public primary schools in a small city in Vietnam. The data consist of interviews with 6 teachers and 24 classroom observations. The study shows that these teachers endorsed the benefits of oral corrective feedback, and they claimed to use prompts to elicit learner repair. They nominated teaching experience as the main factor shaping their beliefs and practices about oral corrective feedback. These claims were partially consistent with their classroom practices, but more incongruence was found. In accordance with their claims, these teachers normally used delayed feedback, and pronunciation errors were the most frequent feedback target. Contrary to their stated beliefs, the teachers used more reformulations than prompts, limiting learner repair. The linguistic patterns of these teachers’ feedback are different from the expected standard expressions. This suggests that the teachers’ problematic classroom discourse skills led to such a mismatch. These findings can be a valuable reference for in-service Vietnamese primary EFL teachers to reflect on their own beliefs and practices about oral corrective feedback. This study suggests that professional development programmes for such teachers incorporate workshops on classroom skills of corrective feedback. Further studies measuring the impact of teacher English proficiency and pedagogical skills on the effectiveness of corrective feedback are needed.