Feedback methods in English in upper secondary school : A study of corrective feedback methods directed at vocabulary errors in the written English of second language learners

Sammanfattning: Previous studies have shown that written corrective feedback (CF) addressing errors can help students to improve their language accuracy. In order to improve students' vocabulary skills, studies suggest that less explicit corrective feedback methods are more successful than more explicit ones. This small-scaled study tried to investigate what CF methods are used by three teachers concerning vocabulary errors in students' written assignments, what method is preferred by the teachers and the students in their classes and why, whether the students have to post-edit the essays after the teacher has given them feedback and finally, whether the students and their teachers believe they improve their vocabulary after the given feedback. The results show that all teachers used a varied set of corrective feedback types. The written corrective feedback method preferred by teachers in this study are underline and underline and describe. The method preferred by students are underline and describe and direct correction. In order for the feedback to be effective, the students need to work with the given corrective feedback.