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

Subject Areas : All areas of language and translation

Khodaverdi Alizadeh ¹ , Nasser Ghafoori ² , Touran Ahour ³

1 - Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
2 - Department of English, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran
3 - English Department, Tabriz Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tabriz, Iran

Received: 2022-09-26 Accepted : 2022-11-03 Published : 2024-04-25

Keywords: gender, speaking, formative feedback, summative feedback, education system,

Abstract :

There has been a long literature on the linguistic differences found in the language men and women speak, but there have not been enough discussions about the reasons why such differences exist. To recognize some major differences a study of feedback could be suggested. In EFL classes feedback is very important specially to enhance speaking proficiency of the learners, but it seems that this has not been investigated properly in foreign language teaching context in Iran. The aim of this study was to investigate the differences between the Iranian EFL learners’ quality of performance across genders. This study examined the use of formative and summative feedback among 80 female and male EFL learners in a language institute in Tabriz, Iran in 2019 employing a quasi-experimental method. Because a pre-test and post-test method were applied to two groups of students to investigate the results of the feedbacks, an independent t-test and a double test method were used to analyze the amount of effectiveness of each of the feedback methods under investigations among genders and also a one-way variance analysis has been administered using SPSS22 software. Results of this study showed that both genders have had a fairly close results regarding the performance quality of speaking among EFL students in Iran. Considering the results, it can be suggested that both male and female students can have equal achievements in learning English considering their performances in speaking.

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