Online Corrective Feedback: A Study on University Students’ Expectations and Preferences in the Malaysian ESL Classroom

The role of a teacher in giving feedback to students’ works or assessments is always crucial to help students to improve. Studies on the use of different approaches in giving feedback and how students feel about it indicate a mismatch between what students are looking for and what teachers think they are giving (Chalmers et al., 2017; Lindsey, 2012). With the adoption of open and distance learning (ODL) in Malaysian public universities, understanding students’ feedback preferences has become increasingly important. This study investigates the types and modes of corrective feedback that students prefer when preparing speech outlines for oral presentation assignments. A questionnaire was distributed to four different groups of students enrolled in the English for Oral presentation course from the Faculty of Dentistry and Faculty of Architecture, Planning and Surveying at a Malaysian public university. A number of 120 students responded to the questionnaire and the results of the survey revealed that the majority of the students preferred the combinations of written, oral and classroom discussions feedback when receiving comments about their work. This study also found that students preferred to receive the lecturers’ feedback via asynchronous online platforms such as Google Classroom, Edmodo and WhatsApp or Telegram chat. These results highlight the need for lecturers to adopt a blended feedback approach that aligns with students’ expectations and digital learning practices.