Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• Mohammad Zohrabi ¹
• Abdolreza Khalili ²

¹ University of Tabriz, Iran

² Urmia University, Iran

Abstract

This study strived to determine the utility of different written corrective feedback strategies for ameliorating medicine English for Specific Purposes (ESP) students’ writing ability. Moreover, it endeavored to specify these students’ perspectives on the pertinent strategies. To this end, the researchers used a mixed-methods design. First, we selected 183 intermediate-level medicine ESP students in six intact classes at two universities in Iran as the participants. Second, we assigned the classes to five experimental groups and one control group. Third, we used a writing pretest, written corrective feedback treatment sessions, and three writing posttests to collect the quantitative data. Finally, we gathered qualitative data on participants’ perspectives on feedback strategies using a semi-structured interview protocol. One-way ANOVA and thematic analysis were used to analyze the data. The results indicated that, while meta-linguistic, electronic, direct, and reformulation-based strategies improved ESP students’ writing ability in the short, medium, and long terms, the indirect strategy was only effective in the short term. Furthermore, the participants preferred explicit strategies to implicit ones. 

Keywords

• Education
• Corrective feedback
• ESP students
• Language learning
• Writing ability