Les croyances des enseignants et des apprenants adultes quant à la rétroaction corrective à l’oral et la pratique réelle en classe de français langue étrangère en Égypte

TLDR: This article investigated teachers' and students' beliefs about corrective feedback provided in French as a foreign language classes in Egyptian universities and explored teachers' actual corrective feedback practices to determine the extent to which they correspond to their declared beliefs.

Abstract: Previous research revealed that Egyptian learners of French as a foreign language who will be the future teachers of French in Egypt produce numerous errors repetitively during oral productions. While this lack of accuracy can be attributed to a cohort of factors (number of students in class, duration of course, age and motivation of students, methods of teaching, etc.), it is assumed in the present study that corrective feedback could be at the origins of the reported results. Defined as implicit or explicit teacher reactions to the learners’ incorrect renditions, corrective feedback is seen by many second language acquisition researchers (Schmidt, 1983, 2001; Long, 1991, 1996; Lightbown, 1998) as a driving force behind interlanguage development. Among other things, corrective feedback draws learners’ attention to form and helps them notice the gap between their interlanguage and the L2 norm. In light of these theoretical arguments along with empirical research findings indicating the benefits of corrective feedback, the present study investigated corrective feedback provided in French as a foreign language classes in Egyptian universities. More specifically, the study explored teachers’ and students’ beliefs about feedback as well as teachers’ in-class use of feedback. Previous research on beliefs indicates that teachers’ beliefs shape their teaching and that learners’ beliefs affect their motivation and determine the effort students are willing to deploy to learn the target language. Based on these theoretical and empirical claims, the present study investigated teachers’ and students’ beliefs about oral corrective feedback in learning French as a foreign language in Egypt and explored teachers’ actual corrective feedback practices to determine the extent to which they correspond to their declared beliefs. A beliefs questionnaire was administered to 175 students and 25 language teachers to determine their beliefs about corrective feedback. Nine of the 25 teachers were also interviewed and observed for a total of 27 hours to further investigate their beliefs and inclass practices.