Abstract

Learners' preferences and opinions about error treatment have been scarcely studied despite the impact they could have on learners' engagement with a corrective treatment and, consequently, on the learning of the target language (Lee, 2008; Han, 2017). Thus, this quantitative exploratory study investigates, through the use of a questionnaire, the preferences and opinions of 133 students, with different levels of linguistic competence of an English Pedagogy Program from a national university, regarding the correction of written errors. The results show that, regardless of the proficiency level, the participants highly value error correction, especially of grammatical errors; however, there are significant differences in the degree of importance assigned to grammar in writing and to grammar instruction, with students with a higher level of competence showing greater independence. Despite this autonomy, both groups favour focused corrective strategies with grammatical explanation and prefer teachers provide the correction. These findings have great significance for a context of language instruction since they allow restricting the use of counterproductive corrective strategies, thus enhancing the acquisition of the language. © 2023 Universidad Catolica Silva Henriquez. All rights reserved.