The Relationship Between Iranian EFL Learners’ and Instructors’ Personality Type and Error Correction Preferences

In the present study the effect of personality type on individuals’ preferences for corrective feedback on writing was examined. This study aimed at investigating Iranian EFL learners’ and teachers’ preferences for error correction. It also intended to find if there is any significant relationship between the most preferred aspect, type, and source of corrective feedback and the participants’ personality type. To this end, three questions were posed and three instruments were used. The necessary data were collected from 41 EFL female students and 9 female teachers of some well-known institutes in Shiraz. The data were gathered through two preference survey questionnaires, one for teachers and the other one for the students, and a personality indicator questionnaire that was the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). Personality questionnaire used in the study was a sixty-item version of the larger Revised NEO Personality Inventory (NEO PI-R: Costa & McCrae, 1992). The results of the study revealed that there is no significant relationship between personality type and participants’ opinions about method, delivering agent of error correction as well as aspect of language to be corrected. According to the results of the study both teachers and students agreed that grammatical error in writing should be more focused and the most favored type of corrective feedback was error identification which supplies the correct form and explanation. But teachers and students opinions regarding the source of error correction were different, the students preferred to be corrected by their teachers while the teachers wanted their students to correct their own mistakes