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Giving Feedback: how?
How can you give feedback?
Clearly, the way in which you deal with the different groupings
for feedback 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.
General ideas for giving feedback
- Always have paper and pen in hand when monitoring, so you can
note things down. Make two 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
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.
- If necessary, focus your feedback on the different criteria
for assessment used in the Speaking test.
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
You can focus a lot on a student's Interactive Communication through
individual feedback; for example, a very quiet student gets a comment
that she or he did not speak enough for you to be able to evaluate,
or a dominant one gets a comment that they must let others speak.
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