Correction and Giving Feedback

Why give feedback?
Although getting your students to talk can often be half the battle, they also need to be helped as much as possible to improve their speaking ability. This means giving feedback of some kind every time they do a speaking activity, and as often as appropriate when they are speaking during any activity, even though speaking isn't the primary focus. There are many reasons for this:

• a speaking activity is like a writing activity – your students would probably complain if you didn't correct their writing, so why should speaking be different?
• your students will feel that they are not wasting time when they speak because they get feedback
• it shows your students how and where they are improving, as well as what they need to work on
• you can focus on lexis or grammatical structures you have been working on, and so recycle them

How can you organise giving feedback?
There are many ways that you can give feedback to your students, and many aspects that you can focus on. Here are some ideas.

• Feedback should be positive as well as negative – tell your students what they do well, as well as what they are getting wrong.
• You can give feedback to the whole class, to small groups or pairs or to individuals. Vary how you do it.

Feedback to the whole class is good:

a)	if you want to keep it short
b)	if there are mistakes common to several students
c)	if you want to focus on a recently studied structures or lexical items

Feedback to small groups is good:

a)	when students have been working in groups
b)	if you want students to work out what the mistake is, or what the correct way of saying it is
c)	if you are focusing on interaction

Feedback to individuals is good:

a)	if you have the time in class to listen to each student
b)	when each student is speaking in turn, for example if you are practising Part 2
c)	if you want students to correct their mistakes for homework

This can also be done in individual tutorials:

a)	if you want to focus on individuals' problems and don't feel you can appropriately spend time on it in class
b)	if you want to give praise and set individual targets

How can you give feedback?
Clearly, the way in which you deal with these different groupings will vary. Sometimes you will want to give feedback on the board, other times it may be oral: the way you choose will depend on how much time you want to spend on it, how serious you feel the point is, what you are correcting, and so on.

Here are some general ideas for giving feedback.

• Always have paper and pen in hand when monitoring, so you can note things down. Make 2 columns, one for things your students are doing well and the other for mistakes.
• Try not to write when your students are looking at you – it will put them off and they will start to focus more on your pen than on what they are talking about.
• Don't feel you always have to be up close to monitor – once your students know that you are going to give feedback, they won't mind where you are in the room. They know you are listening!
• Make sure you always give positive feedback as well as negative. Sometimes, you may only have positive feedback, or may want to focus mainly on the positive – for example, if the Speaking test date is very close or if there has been real improvement in an area that has previously caused trouble.
• There is no need to mention which student made a mistake or did the good thing, unless you want to. It is amazing how students can often recognise what they said.
• Make sure your feedback focuses on the different assessment criteria used in IELTS Speaking, for example by using the criteria categories to structure your feedback.
• Sometimes you will want to let students do the activity and to focus in general on how they perform.
• Sometimes, you can choose one or two criteria and focus just on your students' performance in these areas. You can tell them this before they begin the activity, or only when they have finished. Vary how you do it.
• Sometimes you may want to focus on your students' use of a specific structure or lexical set they have recently studied. Again, you can tell them this before they begin the activity, or when they have finished. Vary how you do it.

Here are some ideas for giving feedback to the whole class.

• Don't just give all the correct answers; elicit them from your students too.
• Some correction needs to be shown on the board, but you can also elicit correction orally.
• Most students like to write down the corrections, so make sure you put them on the board clearly. Try to avoid the risk of your students writing down the mistakes.
• If you give or elicit corrections orally, also write them on the board for students to copy.
• Keep the pace up – change the way you correct or elicit corrections. Don't do it all on the board, or all orally.

Here are some ideas for giving feedback to small groups.

• Have a sheet of paper for each group and write mistakes directly onto these sheets. Then you can just give them to the group to work on.
• Divide the sheets into sections, either those used in the assessment criteria or others you choose, and write the positive aspects and mistakes in the appropriate section. This will help your students to know what they need to look at.
• Put the positive points first.
• Don't write down everything that is wrong – be selective and limit yourself to a predetermined number. With practice, you will get better at selecting what to note down.
• Don't expect students to be able to correct everything, especially complex points. It is better to do these together as a whole group.
• Monitor and help the groups to correct their mistakes.

Here are some ideas for giving feedback to individuals.

• Use small slips of paper, one for each student with their name on.
• Write positive points first.
• Limit the number of mistakes you note down and try to focus on things that are really affecting your students' communication.
• Use this type of feedback to praise and correct items that are really individual. It's especially useful for multilingual groups.
• Organise weekly individual tutorials, where you can discuss strengths and weaknesses more discreetly, and set objectives for the student to work on, reviewing and praising progress in subsequent weeks, as well as setting new targets.