Giving feedback

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I’ve been teaching adults (elementary students) for almost a year and one of the first thing I had to learn was giving the proper and effective feedback to their errors. If I had to choose one of the suggested possibilities from the article (Language Reader) I would vote for the number 9 (reactive teaching), because this one is quite related to my own way of giving a feedback to my students.

 Every student is different of course so it’s absolutely essential to know your students as much as possible in order to give them an effective feedback. On the other hand, it’s almost impossible for a teacher to remember that this student “likes” a reactive teaching and that one clarification requests. Therefore, through experience and mistakes I has created my own style which has become the most effective for my students. To demonstrate my feedback, I’ve chosen an example from the article “He has a long hair,” because this is exactly the case I had to deal with some weeks ago.

St: “He has a long hair.”

T: “Very good, good job but there is actually one mistake in the sentence. Can you recognize the mistake?”

This is the usual beginning of my feedback to students’ errors. I think that the praise plays an important part in it:

The student is praised which could be helpful for him in order not to be so ashamed in front of the class and there is also a good reason for the praise – he understands that we use “has” instead of “have” in the 3rd person singular which is a common mistake for students on this level.
When the student is not able to correct himself I write the sentence on the board (sometimes this visual practice helps the student with the correction) and if he is still not able to correct himself I let the other students to participate in it.

I must say that last semester I was given a very good feedback from my teacher in Practical language. The teacher listened to me and my classmate during our conversation and then gave me a written feedback. I liked it very much because I could take the feedback with me and then learn the exact grammar issue in which I was bad.

Books and other sources I use

Here is an interesting article about "Giving feedback":

www.teachingenglish.org.uk/article/conducting-feedback-exercises-tasks