Written Error Feedback from Perception to Practice: A Feedback on Feedback

Several aspects of written error feedback contexts have been simply overlooked or have remained on the sidelines, partly due to controversies over its long-lasting efficacy. The few studies conducted on the subject, though, failed in imparting key factors at work. This study sought to take learners' and teachers' written feedback perceptions as well as teachers’ actual feedback practices into account to judiciously inspect two major areas of written feedback contexts; firstly, examining potential areas of mismatch between teachers' and learners' perceptions of teachers' error feedback practices and secondly, discovering the possible misfits between teachers' perception of their feedback practices and their actual feedback performance. To this end, 60 participants including 45 students from English classes with a focus on writing and 15 of their teachers were selected and asked to separately fill in teacher and student comprehensive questionnaires. Then, at the end of the course, an actual error correction task was corrected by the teachers and finally, they were orally interviewed. The results indicated four certain mismatch areas between teachers' and learners' views on (1) teachers' manners of marking, (2) use of error codes, (3) awareness of error selection principle and (4) effectiveness of teachers’ error feedback practices. Moreover, four conspicuous areas of misfits between teachers' perception of (1) their manners of error marking (comprehensive vs. selective), (2) manners of feedback provision (direct vs. indirect), (3) use of error codes (4) amount of errors selected and their actual feedback performance were found. The implications are discussed.