The Effect of Metalinguistic Corrective Feedback on Vocabulary Learning and Motivation of Iranian EFL Learners

Teaching vocabulary learning is time consuming, the problem cannot be solved easily.Therefore, students are always dependent on their teachers and the methodologies theteachers use among which metalinguistic as corrective feedback seems to be a great technique. This study was set out within the process-oriented framework to identify the extent to which the metalinguistic corrective feedback contributed to vocabulary learning of the Iranian EFL learners better and also to measure the effectiveness of metalinguistic feedback on students’ motivation. The participants were 40 female students at Taha Language Institute in Azadshahr, Golestan Province, Iran. The design of the study was quasi-experimental (pretest-treatment-posttest). Therefore, at the beginning of the course, students were divided into one control and one experimental group. In experimental group the teacher used metalinguistic corrective feedback for correcting the students errors and in control group the errors were going to be crossed out as incorrect. To analyze the data taken from pretests and posttests, an independent sample t-test was run to probe any significant difference between the experimental and control group on the development of vocabulary. The results demonstrated that with the comparison between the control group and the corrective feedback group, the difference between the control group and the corrective feedback group was significant; in addition, there are significant differences in motivation for vocabulary learning(which was derived from the motivational questionnaire) among the control and metalinguistic groups. This study has some pedagogical implications which can bring thegood points for language teachers and learners