Corrective versus elaborative feedback across reading task modalities: the case of EFL students at Batna 2 university

Abstract EN

The present study investigates improving reading comprehension by using different feedback types: the elaborative which comprised of interpretation cues, and the corrective which was error correction.

the study sampled 73 EFL students who received both forms of reviews as treatments during reading activities, and both were conditioned in terms of task repetition (repeated versus non-repeated) which was the replication or variance of the activities assigned, and task complexity (simple versus complex) which was the required / non-required use of reading structure properties.

results were inconclusive for the first hypothesis that elaborative form would yield a higher comprehension performance: while the corrective type was salient in repetition condition due to resource directing and transfer effects, the elaborative one was significant in the complexity condition resulted by the metalinguistic form of language between the complexities of text, task, and review.

the second hypothesis was not fully confirmed that there was a correlation between the forms and modalities: repetition and type did not correlate with any of the treatments, but complexity exclusively showed strong correlation with the elaborative treatment thanks to attention channeling of cues.

finally, further research suggestions regarding reading comprehension and feedback were recommended.