Summative and Formative Feedback and Gender: A Study of EFL Learners’ Speaking Performance

This study aimed to investigate the differences between the Iranian EFL learners’ quality of speaking performance across genders. To this purpose, the use of formative and summative feedback among 40 female and 40 male EFL learners of a language institute in Tabriz, Iran, was examined employing a quasi-experimental method. A pre-test and post-test method were applied to the two groups of language learners to investigate the results of the feedback, and an independent t-test and a double-test method were used to analyze the amount of effectiveness of each of the feedback methods under investigation. The obtained results showed that both genders had a fairly close speaking performance. This finding implies that EFL teachers can adopt summative and formative feedback in order to enhance EFL learners’ speaking performance.