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hat some EFL teachers do in practice. What is interesting about these teachers is that they tend to correct errors comprehensively against, as they claimed, their better judgment. They felt that it is in contrast with research findings and what they have been told to do in teacher training courses.

All in all, with regard to the results of the study, six points need to be taken into account. First, it seems that it is not the kind of feedback that has the major effect on the improvement of students’ L2 writing. There are some factors which seem to have more significant impact on learners’ L2 writing ability. Ferris (2004) suggests that “the cognitive investment of editing one’s text after receiving error feedback” (p. 54) can possibly be considered as a necessary, or at least a helpful, condition for longer term improvement in accuracy. What can be inferred from this is that although error feedback may be the necessary condition for writing improvement, it may not the sufficient condition in this connection. It seems on the whole that it is difficult to differentiate the effects on the improvement in accuracy of error correction from other factors, particularly in longitudinal studies, and it is not implausible to argue that though researchers may have a hard time demonstrating the efficacy of error feedback in L2 writing over time, it can be an equally thorny problem for them to substantiate its uselessness.

Second, research studies investigating this area are fuzzy. In fact, although learner beliefs about second language acquisition is an extensively researched area, as Tse (2000) notes, “we know almost nothing about student attributions of success or failure in the FL classroom and how these attributions may affect their beliefs about their ability to learn languages” (p. 69). Yet, it is possible to argue that the research findings so far lend support to the specificity of the relationship between learner beliefs and strategy use (Mori, 1999, 2002; Mori, Sato & Shimizu, 2007; and Yang, 1999). In general, learner beliefs will have an impact on the kinds of strategies they choose when/for learning which can eventually make a difference in the linguistic performance of learners. (See Horwitz, 1988; Mori, 1999; and Savignon & Wang, 2003, for a general discussion of learner beliefs, attitudes and perceptions.)

Third, it can be argued that in virtually every classroom, proficiency is an important factor when dividing the shares in decision-making between the teacher and learners. The more proficient the students, the more responsibility they can assume for their instruction, what they learn and how they learn it. Ferris (2004) shares the same idea with Truscott (1996) and Muncie (2002) and correctly notes that “students are not … always the best judges of what they need most” (p. 55). However, as can be inferred from this statement, there are times that students are reliable judges of how and what they should learn. Cook (2003) argues that one of the criticisms which can be leveled at second language acquisition research and attempts thereof is the generic use of the term “the learner”. Ferris’s position may come in for the same criticism. Although in an article describing the-state-of-the-art in error correction research in L2 writing, she, quite generally, mentions “subject characteristics” as one of the factors resulting in the inconsistencies in the design of error correction in L2 wri