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Giving Feedback: why?
Why give feedback?
Although getting your students to talk at all can often be half
of 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 vocabulary 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 and constructive - 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:
- if you want to keep it short
- if there are mistakes common to several students
- if you want to focus on a recently studied structure or lexical
item
Feedback to small groups is good:
- when students have been working in groups
- if you want students to work out what the mistake is, or what
the correct way of saying it is
- if you are focussing on interaction
Feedback to individuals is good
- when each student is speaking in turn
- if you want to focus on individuals' problems and don't feel
you can spend class time on it
- if you want students to correct their mistakes for homework
- if you have the time in class to listen to each student
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