Speaking Feedback
Penny Ur speaks about the following six methods you can use for oral feedback
and correction in her book, ‘A Course in Language Teaching (Ur, 2012)’:
recast, elicitation, clarification request, metalinguistic feedback, explicit
correction
Can you think of an example for each? If you are now thinking about focusing
on ‘form’ in giving feedback and correcting students, read Scott Thornbury’s
post here:
https://scottthornbury.wordpress.com/tag/correction/
Content or Language?
Craig Thaine categorises feedback as ‘content-based’ and ‘language-focused’ in
his book ‘Teacher Training Essentials (Thaine, 2010)’.
It is crucial for a teacher to know when to focus on content and when on
language. Watch this video to see what can happen if you focus on the wrong
thing.
We should keep in mind that feedback on ‘content’ is as important as feedback
on ‘language’. It shows the teacher is interested in the conversation and is
‘actively’ listening. It actually makes the student more enthusiastic to
communicate with the teacher rather than just focusing on making some
grammatically correct sentences.
Writing Feedback
There are different reasons why we teach writing and there should be different
methods how we mark them to address those different reasons; but in the
general sense of dealing with writing tasks in and outside the classroom, there
is a lot of controversy regarding our attitude towards feedback and correction.
Let’s start by having a quick look at what normally happens in a writing session.
This is what usually happens:
1. The teacher selects the topic and gives it to the learners.
2. The learners spend some time either in the classroom or at home
to write about the topic.
3. The learners give their ‘final product’ to the teacher for ‘final
marking’.
But this doesn’t look right, does it? The main purpose of teaching is to facilitate
learning but I don’t see any ‘learning to write’ points, as Christopher
Tribble (Tribble 1997) mentions in his writing book. Raimes (1983) gives the
following stages to make the writing process more productive:
