The Significance of Online Verbal and Written Corrective Feedback in ESL Report Writing among Tertiary Students

Online corrective feedback (OCF) is important in online teaching and learning to detect and measure students’ understanding of the lesson. However, not all researchers agree to this, and continuous debates have been discussed as to whether corrective feedback helps improve language development. This study aims to identify responses to the types of online corrective feedback received by ESL learners and to determine the positive and negative responses to verbal and written corrective feedback. One hundred and fifteen ESL tertiary learners taking the report writing course participated in the study which was conducted during a 14-week semester through the online learning platform. Thereafter, semi-structured interviews were conducted with five randomly selected participants. The findings show that OCF had better responses for verbal corrective feedback than written corrective feedback although both the verbal and written feedback were found to be satisfactory as well as useful to the respondents. In effect, the OCF was able to elicit corrections of content and language. However, for both the verbal corrective feedback and the written corrective feedback, the responses were not all positive. This suggests that online corrective feedback can be effective by means of digital technologies. However, issues such as learner attitude, type of corrections and feedback given, learners’ lack of confidence and language proficiency, besides internet connectivity and other issues, should be addressed. In addition, efforts to provide input in the feedback process is required on the part of the instructor and students to enable the learning objectives to be achieved. For future research, it is recommended that research be conducted on the relationship between OCF and writing performance.