EFL Learners’ behavioral engagement with teacher written corrective feedback: The effect of patterns of dyadic interaction

Although research on written corrective feedback has proliferated over the past decades, scant attention has been paid to how dyadic interaction pattern influence English-as-a-foreign-language learners’ behavioral engagement with feedback. This study explored the extent to which patterns of interaction affect the degree of learner engagement with teacher corrective feedback, learners’ revision behavior, and revision outcome. Forty learners of English as a foreign language on an advanced writing course participated in the study. Learners were provided with comprehensive teacher feedback on six writing tasks and were required to collaboratively process feedback over a 4-month semester. The qualitative analysis of recorded learner talk revealed that although the learners were at the same proficiency level, they adopted a variety of patterns of interaction including collaborative, expert/novice, dominant/dominant, and dominant/passive. By analyzing learners’ pair talk, revised texts, and retrospective interviews, the study revealed that, first, the pattern of dyadic interaction affects the degree of learner engagement with feedback, with collaborative pairs exhibiting a substantially higher amount of extensive engagement with feedback than non-collaborative pairs; second, the pattern of dyadic interaction affects learners’ revision behavior, with non-collaborative, particularly dominant–dominant pairs, showing several instances of unrevised and abandoned errors; and third, the pattern of dyadic interaction affects the outcome of revisions—the collaborative pairs revised their writings significantly more successfully than the non-collaboratives. Furthermore, learners’ perception of their partner’s proficiency was found to be a key factor contributing to a non-collaborative relationship between pair members. These findings are discussed based on relevant literature.