Useful techniques for providing language feedback

Feedback is an integral part of the educational process. When learning something new, we all need to know if we are doing something right and how it can be improved. Therefore, feedback in language learning is essential for students` progress and enhancing future performance. To learn more about it, let's explore the most important aspects: 

One of the most commonly used types of feedback is correction, which can be either positive or negative. For example, if a student gives a correct answer to the question and you respond “That's right”, it is positive feedback.

However, there are other types of feedback that a teacher should know about.

Explicit and implicit

For example: 

Student: I do my homework yesterday.

Teacher: That's wrong. We say “I did my homework yesterday”. “Did” is the past form of “do”.

For example:

Student: I do my homework yesterday.

Teacher: You did your homework yesterday, right?

Immediate and delayed

For instance:

Language and content

It focuses mainly on accuracy and helps develop students` language proficiency. 

For example, a teacher writes a few sentences used by the learners during a speaking or writing task on the board and asks them to identify grammatically correct ones. Then, students discuss how the others should be changed and why.

For example, a teacher asks students to find one thing that they have in common with their partner in the topic of abilities. After the discussion, a few of them are asked to report in what ways they are similar to their peers.

Formal and informal

Each time you respond to students' answers or actions during the lesson, you give them a kind of informal feedback.

It occurs in assessment tasks, tests, exams, etc.

Student peer feedback

It's often used in speaking or writing tasks when students need to evaluate each other's work with some criteria. It helps students become better listeners, readers, and collaborators.

Knowing different forms of feedback is as important as understanding when to provide a learner with it.

However, immediate feedback can be helpful as well.

To choose the right time for feedback you need to identify the aim of the task/ activity: is it accuracy or fluency?

In addition, a teacher should consider the relevance of an error to the aim of your lesson in general. 

For example, you have a lesson on conditional sentences, but your student makes a mistake using articles. Does it need immediate feedback or can it be discussed in later stages? 

The target language is your main focus, so there is no need to interrupt your students and divert them from the flow of speaking.

There are lots of techniques that you can use in your class, but you need to try them out to see which ones are the most effective for your students and each particular situation. 

What is wrong with simply pointing out an error? 

Even though this way of correcting errors seems to be the simplest, it is not always the best one:

Memorisation of the right way to use language is simply not useful for the learners. Plus, it’s too easy to slip into a monologue with a lot of explanations.

So what are other ways of giving feedback on language? 

1. Repeat a sentence up to an error: 

Student: After school, he have dinner.

Teacher: After school, he …. (a teacher uses rising intonation to show that the student should finish the sentence)

Student: He has dinner. 

2. Echo a sentence with an error but using a different intonation or stressing the wrong part:

Student: I like sing.

Teacher: You like SING? 

3. Elicit the correct way to say something:

Student: She work as a manager.

Teacher: Do we say “she work”? 

Student: She works as a manager.

4. Use finger correction:

Student: I have dog.

A teacher shows four fingers and indicates that each finger represents a word using another hand. A teacher points out that there is one word missing between “have” and “dog”. 

5. Use facial expressions and/or gestures to show that there is something wrong in a sentence: surprise, interest, frown, thumbs up/down, etc. 

6. Write the sentences your students used on the board and give learners time to correct them. They can work individually or in pairs discussing how the sentences should be corrected.

Vague feedback without specifying

If you have marked something as “good” then the student needs to know why. Specify what was good about students` performance and what can be improved. 

Overly critical feedback

"This is terrible. You're not good at this."

This feedback probably won’t motivate students to become better at English.

Remember to acknowledge the things students did well too.

Not providing solutions

Students may understand that their performance is not as good as it could be, but you are there in the class to help them enhance it. Consider paying some attention to problematic areas in future lessons to meet your students` needs.  

To sum up, even though most students always expect a teacher to correct their mistakes, remember that you can motivate and inspire your students to either love or dislike learning English. 

So, the balance between positive (praise) and negative (error correction) feedback is crucial. Use feedback to help your students learn and speak with more confidence, not with fear of making a mistake. 

If you want to find out more about feedback, I highly recommend visiting our video library and watching a recorded webinar “Giving feedback: why, when, how” by Olesia Turchak.