SUMMARY
Instructors have many options to give feedback to their students’ writings. The purpose of the present quasi-experimental study was to investigate the effect of corrective feedback on learners’ errors on written grammatical features. In particular, the type of feedback (explicit vs. implicit correction) in different contexts (virtual vs. physical) was investigated. 80 lower-Intermediate Iranian EFL learners studying in Science and Technology University in Tehran were selected based on the results of Quick Placement Test. Using match-paired design, the participants were divided into four equal groups, including explicit physical, implicit physical, explicit virtual and implicit virtual. Two topics were chosen from the TOEFL IBT (2006), one used for pretest and one for posttest conducted after providing the required feedback to the groups. For descriptive statistics, the mean, standard deviation, minimum and maximum scores were provided. For inferential statistics, one-way ANOVAs and the related post hoc tests were conducted. The results of one-way ANOVA conducted for the pretest showed that the four groups were homogeneous. The results of ANOVA for posttest showed that after providing feedback to each group, the students performed differently. According to the results of Scheffe post hoc test, the following findings regarding groups’ performances were found: explicit-physical group had a better performance than the implicit-physical group, explicit group outperformed implicit group in the virtual context, explicit-virtual group benefited the feedback more than explicit-physical group, and finally, implicit-virtual group performed better than implicit-physical group.