“It is just pretty much given to us” : A mixed-methods study of Swedish EFL students’ views, experiences and preferences of written corrective feedback in connection to language awareness

Sammanfattning

In recent years, language awareness (LA) has received increasing attention and is an aim for the English subject in the Swedish curriculum for upper secondary school. The present study aims to connect LA to a practice that teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL) perform on a regular basis, namely written corrective feedback (WCF), which focuses on linguistic or pragmatic errors in students’ texts. To explore what contributions WCF can make towards developing LA, a mixed-methods approach was employed with the participation of 111 Swedish EFL students. The data were collected through semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire. The results revealed that a majority of the participating students believe that WCF can support their development of LA. However, the findings also suggest that students’ views, experience and preferences of WCF might affect their understanding of it and also, to a certain extent, their motivation to attend to it. Therefore, in order for EFL teachers to work towards developing upper secondary students’ LA through WCF, it is important to work with it in class and explore it together with the students by engaging with language (EWL) through WCF.