A Mixed Methods Study of Scaffolded Corrective Feedback and Motivational Scaffolding in EFL Oral Production Accuracy and Fluency

The present study investigates the effectiveness of three scaffolding strategies in improving EFL learners’ speaking accuracy and fluency. Forty five female young adolescent students studying in three intact classes at an English Language institute in Behbahan, Iran were randomly assigned to motivational scaffolding (MS), synchronous scaffolded corrective feedback (SYN) and asynchronous scaffolded CF (ASYN) groups. Before the twelve session treatment, learners were required to express their opinion on a free discussion topic in two minutes. After transcribing the two-minute pretests, the researchers discovered seven types of errors common among the three groups, which were considered in later analyses. After the treatment period, each student’s two minute performance on another topic was considered as her posttest. Mixed-methods data analyses were administered through which the quantitative phase did not show any significant improvement in either of the groups’ speaking accuracy and fluency. However, qualitative inspection revealed that among the two most common grammatical errors, the SYN and ASYN groups showed considerable improvement in terms of third person singular –s. Unlike third person singular –s, simple past takes various forms with different verbs, which requires learners to memorize several distinct instances which in turn can add to the difficulty of this grammatical feature.