Written Corrective Feedback: What Do Malaysian Learners Prefer and Why?

There has been an ongoing debate about the value of providing corrective feedback in writing assignments in English as a foreign/second language classes. Despite the fact, corrective feedback in writing has been analyzed from various perspectives, learners’ expectations regarding feedback given by language instructors are still to be considered. This paper investigates the types of written feedback preferred by the Malaysian students. This study investigated how language learners perceive the usefulness of different types and amounts of written corrective feedback, and also the reasons they have for their preferences. Qualitative and quantitative data was collected from 103 ESL students by means of computer generated written questionnaires. The results showed that Malaysian learners react in favor of direct feedback to their written work, and yet they show little tolerance for simply marking the error without explanation. Moreover, considerable number of the respondents favored indirect corrective feedback with a clue. Possible explanations for the results were given with reference to the theoretical constructs of SLA.