ASYNCHRONOUS COMPUTER-MEDIATED CORRECTIVE FEEDBACK AND THE CORRECT USE OF PREPOSITIONS: Is It Really Effective?

An area that has recently attracted increasing attention is providing feedback onlearners’ writing accuracy through the Internet. However, research in this area haslargely focused on synchronous communication, i.e., chatting, with fewer studiesassessing asynchronous technologies, i.e., e-mailing. Therefore, this study investigatesthe effectiveness of asynchronous computer-mediated corrective feedback-explicit andimplicit, on increasing the correct use of prepositions. Forty-five Iranian elementaryEFL learners at the ILI in Tehran were randomly assigned to two experimental groups,receiving explicit and implicit corrective feedback respectively, and one control groupreceiving no corrective feedback. Each group included 15 participants. After thetreatment, a post-test was administered to assess the probable increase in the correctuse of prepositions for the experimental groups compared to the control group. Analysis of the results through a one-way ANOVA revealed that the experimental group 1 who received explicit corrective feedback significantly outperformed the experimental group 2 and the control group. The experimental group 2 who received implicit corrective feedback showed no significant improvement over the experimental group 1 and the control group. Although the findings support the current view on feedback through technology, due tothe scarcity of research, more investigation is merited as there is much to gainregarding this burgeoning field.