The effectiveness of teachers’ written and verbal corrective feedback (CF) during formative assessment (FA) on male language learners’ academic anxiety (AA), academic performance (AP), and attitude toward learning (ATL) – Language Testing in Asia

Feedback is a kind of assessment that enables instructors to involve individual students in critical thinking about particular parts of their academic work through discussion. While feedback has been found to impact learning outcomes and learner progress significantly, the extent to which this effect is exerted depends on how the feedback is presented (Yu et al., 2021). Written feedback (WF) is one kind of feedback implementation in which instructors are commonly involved and think it necessary to provide it to students. The tool may help students identify “performance objectives, assess their comprehension level, and become aware of misunderstandings” (Gholami, 2022, p.2). Participants may get insight into the best methods to correct their mistakes, gain precise information about their comprehension or performance, and address existing gaps in their knowledge (Sarandi, 2020). One of the main reasons for focusing on WF is to help teachers find practical techniques for assisting their students in improving their academic language and language skills across all subject areas.

Feedback is essential in FA because it tries to increase student learning through the information provided by the instructor. This information helps learners reactivate and reinforce existing knowledge while also focusing on significant parts of what they are learning, which is critical in FA (Chong, 2018; Sauro, 2009). According to Admiraal et al. (2020), feedback should be transformed into feedforward. To do so, feedback should enhance learning by requiring learners to connect with it and act on its recommendations.

The teachers are always concerned about how to provide feedback effectively to affect the students’ performance. There are many factors that the teachers’ CF may influence. One crucial factor is AP. The AP considers elements such as intellectual ability, personality, motivation, skills, passions, study habits, self-esteem, and the teacher-student interaction, among others. When there is a significant difference between the AP and the anticipated performance of the student, this is referred to as diverging performance. In fact, investigating and recognizing the factors involved in the phenomenon of academic motivation is an essential step in students’ academic achievement. Academic motivation can be reduced or increased under various individual and social factors, including AP, academic self-efficacy, and academic resilience (Zhu & Wang, 2019).

This study is supported by the theory of AP (ToP) developed by Elger (2007). Elger (2007) states that an individual’s level of performance helps one understand how close the individual is to achieve the specified outcome. Outcomes are generally established and accessible at the beginning of a task or, as in this study, a module in a course at a university. According to Elger (2007), performance comprises a number of components working together to produce the desired result. The theory emphasizes six foundational concepts that assist in understanding and explaining performance. These components could also assist lecturers with determinants of how performance can be improved. According to Elger (2007), the six components that influence an individual’s performance are as follows: context, level of knowledge; level of skill; degree of identification; personal variables; and fixed elements. Teachers are faced with a conundrum when it comes to the notion of performance. By enhancing our performance, we give ourselves the ability to assist others in learning and developing. As recommended by Harvard’s Project Zero, the learning-for-understanding approach has been shown to be very effective (Jons, 2019). When individuals learn and develop their performance, they are better able to produce outcomes that make a difference in their communities. Working and learning together to make the world a better place has always been a key purpose of higher education, regardless of the time period or location (Chuang, 2021).

Furthermore, the correction of mistakes by the instructor results in improved AP scores for the learners. Instructors employ different approaches for providing feedback to learners to attain this goal. Some of the strategies used are self-assessment, peer feedback, teacher-student conferences, electronic feedback, and WF from the instructor. Of all of these types of feedback, the feedback provided by instructors seems to be the most important in terms of learners’ overall growth (Sarré et al., 2021; Zhang & Rahimi, 2014). According to Chen et al. (2016), CF back is the most extensively utilized kind of feedback that learners get worldwide, and it is also the most common type of feedback. In order to improve learners’ performance, it is critical to provide them with CF. It directly impacts the process of teaching and learning in the classroom. Pourdana et al. (2021) emphasize that CF may take on a variety of shapes and forms. It may differ depending on its explicitness, focus, the individual giving the feedback, and the media used to provide the feedback. Mohammadi and Yousefi (2019) investigated feedback techniques and discovered that some instructors utilize codes to reply to their students’ work in various areas, including mathematics. In the same vein, a research conducted by Rahimi et al. (2021) investigated the sorts of feedback given to students, such as form vs. content, and found that instructors believe CF is more beneficial.

According to Janssen (2017), feedback has a statistically significant beneficial impact on learners’ academic progress in terms of grades. Learners who get positive feedback from their instructors do better in examinations and engage in more classroom activities than those who do not receive feedback. In their research on student improvement in written correctness, Carlton et al. (2016) discovered that students who received feedback on their mistakes exhibited significant improvements in their test outcomes. Guasch et al. (2019) investigated the differences in performance between participants who got WF and those who did not get written input. Results showed that students who received constant WF from their instructors performed better in examinations than students who did not get constant WF. According to Chong (2018), positive feedback from professors helps pupils increase their accuracy in expressing thoughts and understanding conceptual notions. In this regard, Mosek and Gilboa (2016) came to the conclusion that WF is useful in developing learners’ writing abilities.

Gholami (2022) observed that providing students with feedback on their class assignments dramatically improves their outcomes. Learners will get a thorough understanding of the ideas in this manner. Klimova (2015) discovered that participants’ modifications in response to their professors’ WF were connected with considerably greater test scores on the next day. Sarandi (2020) argues that written CF (WCF) increases students’ accuracy in speaking and writing and has a positive effect on their learning of a language’s accuracy in acquisition. Participants who get frequent feedback from their lecturers have increased linguistic abilities such as writing, reading, speaking, and listening, according to Zhu and Wang (2019), who conducted a study comparing the outcomes of students in different language classrooms to reach this conclusion. According to Jons (2019), learners who have more substantial language talents do better in examinations and have a more in-depth comprehension of challenging ideas.

Obviously, proper education and progress in learning English and increasing academic resilience and related academic meaning require identifying the problems in the way students learn in this course (Mohsenpour et al., 2006; Zhang & Rahimi, 2014). Problems with learning English have either intra-personal or extra-personal roots. In-person problems arise from the characteristics of students in their mental processing, resilience, and learning methods, in contrast to external problems from cultural, social, educational factors, teaching methods, and teachers’ attitudes and feedback (Sadler, 1989). One of the most important extra-personal problems is the method of providing teachers’ feedback during FA as an integral part of their teaching and learning process.

According to Sadler (1989), the FA approach with appropriate feedback is an approach that is used to assess if students have achieved all their goals. Research on feedback is initially concerned with behavioral theories such as Thorndike and Skinner. Teacher feedback can be defined as how the teacher responds to students’ performance, attitude, and behavior according to the identified educational goals. Feedback can be applied in various forms such as corrective, written, verbal feedback, body language and gestures, confirmation of student’s statements, encouragement, and criticism. In this research, the teacher CF (written and oral) based on the CF model by Butler and Winne (1995) is emphasized.

One of the important goals of teacher evaluation is that students become aware of their strengths and weaknesses to strengthen the former and overcome the latter (Richardson et al., 2014). The frequency and appropriateness of teacher feedback content are the factors that play a prominent role in the process of resilience and increase the students’ ability and motivation to overcome barriers and academic failures (Alonso & Panadero, 2010). Feedback on FA is a compelling feature that improves the teaching and learning process and can be a valuable method. This, in turn, raises the meaning of education and reduces students’ psychological stress (Klimova, 2015; Kreitzer & Sweet-Cushman, 2021; Kodal et al., 2022;). These demands will not be possible unless the learner receives accurate, appropriate, and complete feedback in the educational process continuously and purposefully. By giving CF, students will be well-aware of their efforts, progress, and successes in the language learning process. In addition, it enables them to understand their position in learning flow engineering and manage their activities to achieve greater resilience and academic meaning (Li & Barnard, 2011).

Another leading theory that supports this study is Feedback Intervention Theory (FIT). In the FIT, when a person receives feedback demonstrating that an objective has not been accomplished, their focus may be concentrated on one of three levels: (1) the specifics of how to execute the work, (2) the activity as a whole, or (3) the processes that the individual participates in while executing the job (meta-task processes).

More importantly, many foreign language learners (FLLs) have difficulty in learning the language, while others have a more straightforward time of it, and educators have been searching for the reasons for this for quite some time. Underachievers are learners that have trouble acquiring a foreign language and are considered underachievers. Several affective aspects are recognized to be significant in language acquisition, including attitude, anxiety, motivation, and beliefs about foreign language learning, and anxiety has received a great deal of attention as a deciding factor. As Sarré et al. (2021) noted, foreign language acquisition for non-native speakers may often be a terrible experience for language learners. According to Leenknecht et al. (2021), various elements influence acquiring a foreign language, including age, IQ, motivation, attitude, gender, personality, anxiety, etc. Among these factors are: Language acquisition occurs naturally, but learning a foreign language in a formal setting, such as a classroom, presents a number of difficulties for the majority of learners. According to Martin et al. (2017), one of these well-documented difficulties stems from the students’ feelings of anxiety.

When it comes to learning a foreign language, language anxiety is believed to be the most detrimental and vital factor that hinders students from achieving success. As described by Karimi (2015), anxiety includes emotions of unease, self-doubt, apprehension, and concern. Yang et al. (2021) described language anxiety as a sensation of tension that is uniquely associated with second language environments, such as speaking, listening to others speak, and learning a second language. Many types of research have been conducted on foreign language anxiety and the problems that might arise from this sensation while participating in tasks such as listening, speaking, reading, and writing (Heckel et al., 2021; Papi, 2010). Anxiety has been found to have a deleterious influence on learners’ academic attainment and performance in the classroom. According to Martin et al. (2022), anxiety might lead students to divide their attention between several scenes simultaneously, resulting in their being unable to perform effectively in the classroom. It is important to note that there has been minimal research on reducing and alleviating this negative feeling.

Learners prefer collaboration. If given the opportunity, they can provide and receive essential and valued comments, ideas, and praises from a peer. In language education, peer feedback is a method in which one learner provides feedback to another learner. The comments made by peers are referred to as CF. As a result, CF is a two-way process where one participant collaborates with another. Several learning theories provide credence to the idea of CF. According to the Collaborative learning theory (Bruffee, 1984), learning is a social process that takes place in groups. This is a type of communication amongst peers, and the debates that ensue assist students in negotiating the meaning and knowledge of the material. “Scaffolding,” according to Vygotsky (1978), is a term that typically refers to a more experienced peer assisting a less experienced learner in their learning. In his “Zone of Proximal Development,” Vygotsky stresses that people’s cognitive development happens due to their interactions with others in their social environment. He argues that children’s language and cognitive development is best accomplished in conjunction with more competent members of society.

Although English is taught as a foreign language (EFL) in Iran, due to the limited possibilities for students to practice and utilize it in a real-world setting, it is difficult for them to make significant progress unless they are very motivated and active learners. When students are studying in this kind of EFL setting, they are very likely to have some amount of language anxiety, which may have a negative impact on their language acquisition (Chen & Chang, 2004; Sabale et al., 2022).

Anxiety in the second language classroom is a significant concern for ELT scholars (Alsudais et al., 2022; Ang et al., 2022; Hood et al., 2021). According to Martin et al. (2022), speaking anxiety relates to the learner’s nervousness when creating the spoken language in front of an audience. Both Horwitz et al. (1986) and Kurt and Atay (2007) assert that speaking anxiety may be viewed as a conceptually unique variable in foreign language acquisition and that the literature supports this. The communication anxiety experienced by students, according to Rassaei (2015), may be burdensome and harm students’ adaption to the target environment and the attainment of their educational objectives. In their study on the causes of speaking anxiety, Abdullah et al. (2010) discovered general anxiety, anxiety about being evaluated negatively, and anxiety about communicating successfully.

Similarly, Yaikhong and Usaha (2012) examined speaking anxiety to construct and validate a scale. An examination of the data utilizing factor analysis revealed that public speaking anxiety, test anxiety, and fear of a poor assessment were all included in the scale established to quantify it. Furthermore, according to Sheen (2008), individual learner characteristics such as anxiety comprise a significant design element that may influence the impacts of CF on the advancement of L2 knowledge and knowledge retention. Because of this, further research into the effects of various forms of CF on L2 acquisition and the moderating effects of individual learner characteristics should be conducted before any conclusions can be drawn about the effectiveness of different kinds of CF.

A variety of causes may exacerbate learners’ FL anxiety in language courses. Based on the researchers, Pourmousavi and Mohamadi Zenouzagh (2020), the causes and effects of FL anxiety in L2 learning environments cannot be readily distinguished from one another. According to research, counter-productive ideas and mistaken misconceptions about language acquisition, such as the expectation that one would obtain high levels of competence in a short period of time, may contribute to language anxiety and make the situation worse (Lu & Cutumisu, 2022). Park (2020) discovered that language anxiety is negatively connected with perceived L2 competence, implying that students’ false perceptions about their skills may be the source of their worry in language learning situations. There is also controversy about whether anxiousness is the cause or outcome of a failure to do well on a test. A theory proposed by Sparks and Ganschow (1993) suggests that anxiety in foreign language classes may result from issues with processing input and creating output rather than being the root cause of subpar performance. According to Poth (2018), on the other hand, evidence has been presented supporting the more accepted concept that anxiety is the root cause of poor performance.

All in all, knowing the specific methods of language teaching (including the use of effective feedback) can reduce the anxiety of learners and alleviate the difficulties of learners learning a foreign language, and subsequently make the teaching-learning process more enjoyable for learners and create a positive attitude which is effective in learning the language (Tai et al., 2022). Learning through CF is essential to the learning process because it offers learners extra information beyond whether or not their responses are accurate. When it comes to CF, the difficulty level might vary from providing learners with accurate answers to discussing why a particular response was accurate or wrong.

Another important component that is influenced by the CF is one’s attitude. Specifically, it is necessary to examine if individual variations such as anxiety and learners’ attitudes impact the impacts of various types of CF in ESL classrooms to comprehend the function of CF in these settings. Students’ attitudes toward mistake correcting, which may be affected by their cultural and educational backgrounds (among other variables), may impact learning results, among other things. In their study, Oxford and Shearin (1994) found that six elements influence language acquisition: attitude, beliefs about one’s own self, learning objectives, entanglements or participation in the process of language learning, environmental support, and one’s own personal attitude. Gass and Selinker (2008) further assert that “in every learning setting, neither all individuals are equally driven to acquire languages, nor are they equally motivated to learn a given language” (p.165). Consequently, instructors should be responsive to students’ attitudes about language, especially toward mistake correction, even if it may be claimed that learners’ preferences may not be the greatest for language acquisition in the long run (Alsudais et al., 2022).

It is believed that social and psychological characteristics, such as attitude and motivation, play a critical role in acquiring a second or foreign language. Gardner (2004) designed his socio-educational model “Attitude/Motivation Test Battery (AMBT)” to measure several characteristics connected to individual variations, and he has since published his findings. Although many factors influence motivation in second or foreign language acquisition, three of the most important ones are a desire to learn the language, effort put in to learn the language, and good attitudes toward learning the language (Gardner, 2004). It has been stated that CF may either support or impede the processing and development of learning a language depending on the attitude of learners and instructors toward mistake correction as well as the kind of CF used in the learning process (Sarandi, 2020).

Given the possibility that CF might be delivered implicitly, overtly, or in combination, it would be interesting to determine if learners have different attitudes and views regarding the forms of CF available to them. Another, more extensive body of study has looked at how learners interpret feedback and whether or not their views have an impact on their future growth in the second language (Mackey, 2012; Martin et al., 2022; Mosek & Gilboa, 2016). According to Sheen (2004), a questionnaire with a Likert scale of (1-6) was developed to assess language anxiety, attitudes toward mistake correction, grammatical precision, and whether or not learners consider instructors’ correction to be valuable and significant. The findings revealed that positive attitudes toward mistake correction and grammatical precision were greater in the explicit group than in the implicit group, with the explicit group outperforming the implicit group. As a result, metalinguistic feedback was shown to be very beneficial to learners. That is, according to Sheen, attitudes toward mistake correction and grammatical precision cannot be anticipated to have any mediating influence if learners are unaware that they are receiving correction. If teachers provide written and verbal feedback appropriate to the student’s level of understanding and related to the subject of teaching immediately, it will create a sense of happiness and joy in them and change their attitude.

Furthermore, feedback immediately provided to the student causes the student to have a positive attitude towards continuous learning and be more involved in learning in terms of academic achievement. The final result of this study was that students who received immediate CF reached better AP (Cook & Artino Jr, 2016; Hoorens et al., 2021; Hunnikin et al., 2022; Mainhard et al., 2018). The results of studies have also shown that teachers’ feedback has a positive effect on improving the level of emotions of students’ academic achievement. Another consequence of their research was that feedback is one of teachers’ most important personality and behavioral characteristics in the classroom. Rojas (2015) and Samuel (2021), in their study on factors affecting the academic resilience of high school students, concluded that the variables of academic optimism, parental support, corrective and constructive teacher feedback, self-confidence, positive thinking, and high motivation are among the most important predictors of academic resilience and AP.

Cook (2008) states that CF signifies that learners realize their mistake in using the target language. This sign may be from any source (teacher, classmates, or native speakers). CF is not encouragement or punishment; instead, it only gives learners the knowledge of what they have done, what areas they have succeeded in, and what areas they have failed (Scott, 2005). According to Cook (2008), feedback has different types: explicit correction method, stimulation, repetition, correct reading, and request clarification. In the last forty years, error correction has been a controversial topic in foreign language teaching and learning, which has led to various perspectives in this area (Ellis et al., 2006; Yu et al., 2021). Although many efforts have been made in recent years, it may be argued that there is a need for more research and studies in language teaching on the effectiveness of teachers’ written and verbal CF during FA on AA, AP, and ATL of male language learners.

The hypotheses of the present study are:

• H0 1: Teachers’ written and verbal CF during FA significantly affects male language learners’ level of AA.

• H0 2: Teachers’ written and verbal CF during FA significantly affect the level of male language learners’ AP.

• H0 3: Teachers’ written and verbal CF during FA significantly affects the male language learners; ATL.