From Corrective Preferences to Corrective Practice: A Critical Review of Attitudinal Studies on Oral Corrective Feedback

Studies on oral corrective feedback (OCF) have been lately tilted toward examining preferences for correction motivated by the belief that they are connected to emotional comfort, learning motivation and outcomes. Some have compared teachers’ preferences with learners’ expectations to find the mismatches between the two. Others have compared teachers’ beliefs with their practice to see how beliefs are reflected in practice. Despite the numerous studies, there seem to exist considerable gaps in the literature that merit consideration. Given the significance of studying OCF preferences, the present study presents a critical systematic review of the studies on corrective preferences to uncover the gaps. For this purpose, scientific databases, including Google Scholar, Scopus, Web of Science, ScienceDirect and JSTOR with 16 related journals, were searched to identify the related studies in the date range of 1995 to 2025. This was to ensure inclusion of the most relevant and high-quality research studies published in well-established scientific databases and journals. After screening the identified studies based on the inclusion criteria, they were subjected to MMAT quality appraisal analysis; 34 studies were finally selected and subjected to thematic analysis to identify the major trend of the studies and their conceptual and methodological limitations. Methodologically, the results pointed to heterogeneous definitions and interchangeable use of different terms and a need to present unified definitions. The results also highlighted the need for a more dynamic approach to examining preferences and their reflection in practice. Conceptually, the findings revealed a lack of conclusive evidence for the value (to be) assigned by teachers to learners’ preferences and under-investigated misconceptions/unawareness about learners’ preferences. The results also point to the need for building a connection between research and practice to help develop more refined corrective beliefs and, consequently, practice. Implications for language teaching practitioners, researchers and teacher education programs are finally discussed.