Providing feedback is something every teacher does. Correcting your students’ answer is natural to almost every teacher and helps students to grow and develop.
In a CLIL lesson, teachers are expected to not just provide feedback on the content but also on the language.
What different ways can you provide feedback? And more importantly, how do you use provide effective feedback?
The definition of feedback
The word ‘feedback’ is being used in a wide variety of ways. While preparing a workshop on this topic recently I stumbled upon the website of ASCD, an American education association. They mentioned an interesting opinion that I agree with:
The term feedback is often used to describe all kinds of comments made after the fact, including advice, praise, and evaluation. But none of these are feedback, strictly speaking.
Let me explain
Feedback is supposed to be without advice or evaluation. A simple observation explaining the results of the actions performed, as seen from the observant, should be sufficient.
Maybe you have heard of this quote by Benjamin Franklin:
Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn
In other words, to provide effective feedback, a student should realize the learning opportunity themselves and come up with the correct answer on their own.
Does that imply you can never provide the correct answer or express your opinion? Of course not!
In a perfect world you would have enough time to help out every student individually, guiding their education with lots of patience and available time.
That’s just not the case in everyday education.
With over 30 students in your class and a serious amount of content and language to discuss, you might have to resolve to provide the correct answer yourself.
That’s fine, as long as you realize you can also do it in different ways.
Six types of feedback
In your lessons you can provide feedback in six different ways. In this blog post I will discuss three of them, in a later blog post I will discuss the other three.
The six types of feedback are: Elicitation, Repetition, Recast, Explicit correction, Clarification requests and Meta-linguistic feedback.
Elicitation
When a teacher uses elicitation to correct a student’s answer, he (or she) will copy the answer of the student, excluding the mistake.
This type of feedback should only be used when you are sure the student actually knows the answer. It can be very discouraging for a student when he/she knows the answer is wrong but is not sure what the correct answer should be.
For example:
Student: I see a great movie yesterday
Teacher: Sorry, you … a great movie yesterday?
Student: Right, I saw a great movie yesterday
Repetition
When a teacher uses repetition to correct a student’s answer, he (or she) will copy the answer of the student, including the mistake but stressing it.
Not correcting the mistake but stressing it should, like elicitation, only be used when you know the student can correct himself. If you decide it is okay to allow another student to help out, make sure the student you started with knows the correct answer as well. You can ask for the correct answer again later on in the lesson to make this very effective feedback.
For example:
Student: I see a great movie yesterday
Teacher: So, you see a movie yesterday?
Student: Right, I saw a great movie yesterday
Recast
When a teachers uses recasting, the teacher copies the answer of the student, correcting the mistake.
So, according to the definition of feedback mentioned earlier, this is not really feedback. However, it can be a very effective way of correcting a student. Do make sure that you make the student repeat the correct answer again, to make sure the student realizes the mistake!
For example:
Student: I see a great movie yesterday
Teacher: Alright, so you saw a great movie yesterday?
Student: Yes, I saw a great movie yesterday
Conclusion
To make sure this post does not become to lengthy, I will discuss the next three types of feedback in another post. However, with these three alone you should already have become a bit more aware of the way you correct students and provide effective feedback.
How do you provide feedback? Do you only provide feedback on content or also on language? Let me know by responding in the comments below or responding on twitter or facebook!
Continue reading How to provide effective feedback part 2