Effects of Task Feedback on EFL Students’ Reading Self-Efficacy

Abstract

Many countries, including Malaysia, China, South Korea, Italy, and others, have their own guidelines for teaching English. These guidelines emphasize the critical nature of language teaching and acquisition, which cannot be separated from the following four basic components: listening, speaking, reading, and writing (Blake, 2016). Reading is an indispensable language skill for English learners. Improving reading fluency and comprehension is an important task for EFL students (Gilakjani & Sabouri, 2016). However, there are obvious challenges and obstacles to the teaching and acquisition of reading. An important problem is that EFL students have low levels of self-efficacy and a marked lack of confidence in their ability to pass a reading assessment and achieve excellence (Habibian & Roslan, 2014). This phenomenon can be attributed to the fact that learners develop the habit of receiving English knowledge directly from teachers while using traditional teaching methods (Kaymakamoglu, 2018). The extensive application of TBLT in America and Europe makes it an ideal teaching method for language learners. However, this teaching method has not reached its maximum potential in China, especially task-based teaching, which relies on more specific teaching techniques such as task feedback. Therefore, based on the paradigm shift in traditional teaching methods, this study takes task-based teaching and reading feedback as examples to illustrate how to improve English learners' self-efficacy. It is expected to be a resource for English reading teaching in senior high schools, promoting students' growth and helping students develop their basic English language skills. The research question is the effect of task feedback on English learners' reading self-efficacy. This study involves an experimental group and a control group through the participants of the experiment before and after the results of the questionnaire to reach the conclusion of research questions.