Saudi EFL Private Institute Students’ Perceptions of the Effects of Written Corrective Feedback on EFL Writing Progression

The literature reviews have delved deeper into the types of written feedback (Sun and Qi, 2022), students' viewpoints towards written corrective feedback (Cooperman and Berenato, 2014), and teachers' perceptions of the effective type of feedback (Alkhatib and Mansoor, 2022). Almost all studies on feedback were conducted at public universities. However, this article explores the EFL private institute students' impressions of receiving written corrective feedback on their writing. The participants received metalinguistic written feedback on their first writing drafts over a two-month course. They submitted eight descriptive writing tasks throughout the intervention. Focus group discussions and semi-structured interviews were conducted at the end of the intervention. The findings showed that although the students had some difficulties in writing, good development was observed in the use of grammar and punctuation. The findings of this current paper encourage private institute instructors to use metalinguistic written feedback for assessing students' writing tasks. This study demonstrates the need for conducting more research on using different types of written feedback in writing courses at private institutes. Pedagogically, this study's findings may serve as a kind of reference for EFL Arab private institute teachers about the positives of utilizing written feedback for enhancing EFL students' writing.