Feedback in one-to-one lessons – How I do it now
Feedback is a necessary part of the learning process. This means it needs to be a part of the teaching process too. I have always believed that teaching is not a one-way process, which implies that feedback goes in both directions as well – from the teacher to the student and the other way round. As a teacher I find getting feedback from my students extremely important; I ask for it, I appreciate it and I try to act upon it. That being said, I’d like to dedicate this post to the ways in which I give feedback to my students in our one-to-one classes.
Before I move on to my own practice of giving feedback, we should perhaps look at what feedback actually is and what the rules for giving good feedback are. I tried to think back to a number of conference sessions on the topic of feedback and error correction, I searched my memory and the internet to find some learned opinions and I also tried to think about my own experience. I found a definition that I like, here it comes:
Language feedback is information provided to a student by an instructor or by another student that helps both that student and others in the classroom understand how well they are using the target language. It can be used to give a general indication of proficiency in any particular skill (speaking, writing, listening or reading) or it can be used to hone in on specific topics (grammar, vocabulary, etc.) that are new or are in need of review.
So how to give feedback well so that it’s well received and helpful? Here’s a set of recommendations that I put together. In my opinion, good feedback should be:
- non-judgemental – even though you’re pointing out what was not OK, comments like “You should know it by now.“, “That’s SO easy, how come you still can’t remember it?“ definitely won’t help. Yes, I do say it’s beneficial to connect learning with emotions but those emotions should be positive, right?
- impersonal – we’re talking about the student’s language, not their personality, general abilities, etc.;
- balanced – I noticed this is something especially Czech people are guilty of – we love to focus on the negative stuff. Good feedback should include both positive and negative points. And my advice is to start with the good stuff 😉
- specific – general phrases such as “some good language“ or “certain words missing“ aren’t of much help (and yes, I used to be totally guilty of that too). If the feedback is meant to be helpful, it needs to tell the student exactly what’s wrong;
- timely – not too late but not too early either. This, of course, depends mostly on the type of activity/task you are giving feedback on – is it fluency practice, a grammar gap-fill exercise or an essay?
- inclusive – what do I mean by that? You’re the one who’s giving feedback to your student but don’t do all the work for them. Personally, I just indicate that there’s a certain problem with what they said/wrote and let them figure out what the problem is.
- trackable – it’s definitely great if the students can keep track of the sort of problems they had with their language in order to reflect on their learning process and, hopefully, see the progress they’ve made. This is by far easier with feedback on written tasks but I’ll show you how it can be easily done with spoken language too;
- encouraging – no matter the number of problem areas, I believe one of the roles of us, teachers, is to give hope to our students that they can eventually make it. And they can! 🙂
OK, I think that’s about it and now let’s move on the my own way of giving feedback. I’m pretty sure a lot of my colleagues will find this trivial but it works great for me and my students seem to appreciate it too. I was looking for something that would allow me to provide feedback and keep track of the (new) things we do in each lesson. It’s sometimes hard in classes where you don’t use a textbook. Approximately three years ago I started using the feedback forms that you can see in the picture. Apart from the student’s name and the date, there are three sections: one for the good points, one for the things that need improvement and the third section is dedicated to new language we come across (or older stuff that needs reinforcement).
In the course of the lesson, I’m simply noting down the things that deserve praise, the ones that need to be worked on and also new vocabulary, grammar or anything else I consider worth mentioning. I always write down the phrase/part of a sentence/clause where there was a problem but I rarely correct the mistakes/errors myself. At the end of each lesson, I present the feedback form to the student and we dedicate some time to working on the issues. This way the student has to think about the language and being actively involved in the correction helps them understand and make progress.
Some of my students also work with the new language section at home, copying new vocabulary/grammar into their notebooks. They also keep the feedback forms, so they can go back to them at any time if they need to. I have to say that besides using these feedback forms I sometimes interrupt the student and correct them straight away if it’s a fossilized mistake or a pronunciation problem that hinders understanding. I also actively use my own system of gestures so that I don’t have to stop the student if immediate correction is necessary – they are know the meaning of those gestures and they can correct themselves.
One final note: I find it close to impossible (or at least impractical) to use this system in my group lessons. Here, instead of working with the forms, I note down the mistakes/errors on a separate piece of paper and then I address the issue(s) in front of the whole class. That gives me three benefits – firstly, I can stay focused and continue with my lesson plan while still “taking care“ of the incorrect language. Secondly, providing feedback to an individual in front of the whole class is a tricky matter and shier/more self-conscious students may get more suffering than help from such practice. Thirdly, it’s most likely that the mistake is something that is relevant to more students than just the one who actually made it on that one occasion. Of course, the same goes for the good language that appears during the lesson 🙂
That’s probably all from me for today on the topic of giving feedback one-to-one. As usual, I hope that some fellow teachers might find this useful and language students can get a better idea of what the job entails. See you next time!
Source: https://www.fluentu.com/blog/educator/language-feedback/
Photo taken by myself.