The Impact of Gender on Teacher's Feedback in Iranian Upper-intermediate EFL Classroom Discourse

Abstract

This study aims to investigate the teachers’ feedback with their students from the point of view of gender and to see whether teacher's feedback is affected by the gender of students. The participants of this study were 120 upper-intermediate (60 female and 60 male) and 12 teachers in EFL conversation classes in different language institutes in Isfahan. Classes were either single-gendered or mixed gendered. In order to conduct this research and answer the research questions, 12 classes were observed and coding procedures to clarify the types of the feedback were employed by the researchers. In addition, patterns of interactions were investigated according to teachers’ question types and corrective feedbacks. The results of the study showed that explicit feedback covering a wider range of feedback than implicit ones. Moreover, it was noted that in mixed classes, more feedbacks (both implicit and explicit) were employed. The findings could provide guidance for teachers in the language institutes for employ a fair amount of all the categories included in categorizations of question types, responses and feedbacks.