Impacts of implicit, explicit, and emergent feedback strategies on EFL learners' motivation, attitude and perception

The aim of this study was to develop an understanding of the possible various influences of teachers' oral corrective feedback (CF) strategies on learners' learning motivation and further to investigate the learners' attitudes and perceptions toward their teachers' feedback strategies. The participants were 54 pre-intermediate Iranian EFL learners comprising three experimental groups (Implicit, Explicit, and Emergent). The Implicit and Explicit groups received just recast and explicit correction for their erroneous oral production, respectively, while the Emergent group took CF from implicit to explicit. A motivation questionnaire and semi-structured interviews were used to gather the quantitative and qualitative data for the study. The results of inferential statistics indicated meaningful differences among the feedback types with respect to their effectiveness on learning motivation. Moreover, emergent feedback was more effective compared with the other feedback types in raising the learners' learning motivation. The results of the qualitative data analysis also confirmed the effectiveness of the emergent feedback in boosting the positive affective characteristics in learners. This study could specifically increase teachers' and teacher trainers' awareness of the interrelationship between CF types and language learning motivation, attitude and perception.