While the bulk of feedback studies have focused on written corrective feedback, oral feedback in teacher-student writing conferences in EFL context has been underexplored. This article investigated teacher oral feedback based on the tenets of sociocultural theory. It examined the impact of teacher-student writing conferences on students’ accuracy and frequency of cohesive devices employment. The study followed a quasi-experimental design with a pre-test, intervention and post-test. Data were collected from an intensive writing course for intermediate students at the college level. Based on guided-free writing prompts, the students had to write argumentative paragraphs of about 150–180 words followed by individual conference sessions to offer them oral feedback. The findings showed that oral feedback in writing conferences statistically impacted the students’ writing performance with huge effect size (Cohen’s d = 2.19). Moreover, the results demonstrated empirical evidence that writing conferences positively impacted the students’ frequency of employing referential markers (t value = − 3.011; p = 0.006 < 0.05) and conjunctions (t value = − 2.200; p = 0.039 < 0.05). Further, oral feedback statistically impacted the students’ accuracy of utilizing referential markers (t value = − 6.874; p = 0.000 < 0.05) and conjunctions (t value = − 7.253; p = 0.000 < 0.05). Writing conferences provided mediated learning experience for the students. The oral feedback assisted the students to decrease the overuse of the first, second person pronouns and the definite article ‘the’ with generic meaning in their writing. Instead, they depended on noun phrases and the third person pronouns which contributed to the text overall cohesion by creating explicit chains of references to the antecedents within the textual environment. Also, oral feedback helped the students to use conjunctions appropriately and accurately, so their texts were written densely cohesive. Pedagogical implications were discussed at the end of the article.

虽然大多数反馈研究都集中在书面纠正性反馈上，但在EFL语境下的师生写作会议中的口头反馈却未得到充分研究。本文根据社会文化理论的宗旨对教师的口头反馈进行了调查。它研究了师生写作会议对学生正确性和使用粘性装置的频率的影响。该研究遵循准实验设计，包括预测试，干预和后测试。数据是从针对大学水平的中学生的强化写作课程中收集的。根据无指导的写作提示，学生们必须撰写约150-180个单词的辩论性段落，然后召开单独的会议以向他们提供口头反馈。研究结果表明，写作会议中的口头反馈对学生的写作表现有统计学影响，且影响力很大（Cohen d = 2.19）。此外，研究结果还提供了经验证据，表明写作会议对学生使用参考标记的频率产生了积极的影响（t值= − 3.011；p  = 0.006 <0.05）和连词（t值= − 2.200; p  = 0.039 <0.05）。此外，口服反馈统计学影响学生利用参考标记（T值= - 6.874;精度p  = 0.000 <0.05）和连词（T值= - 7.253; p = 0.000 <0.05）。写作会议为学生提供了中介学习的经验。口头反馈帮助学生减少了对第一，第二人称代词和定冠词“ the”的过度使用，这些冠词在其写作中具有普遍意义。取而代之的是，它们依赖名词短语和第三人称代词，它们通过在文本环境中创建对先行词的显式引用链来促进文本的整体衔接。此外，口头反馈有助于学生正确正确地使用连词，因此他们的课文写得很紧密。本文结尾讨论了教学意义。