9 Simple But Powerful Tips For Giving Effective Feedback

Giving effective feedback is an essential skill for teachers. It should be regular and ongoing. Your students need to know how they are doing, whether their performance meets expectations, and how they can improve.

But giving feedback isn’t always easy. You may worry about hurting the students’ feelings, or that they’ll take it the wrong way and become reluctant to participate in activities anymore. And with their confidence knocked, you could see a decline in motivation and performance.

So, we can say that if not delivered well, feedback can sometimes do more harm than good. As a result, teachers should know well how to deliver constructive feedback in a way that is helpful to their students.

There are many different tips for giving effective feedback. Here are nine that have a higher success in improving students’ performance and motivating them to keep participating in doing the learning tasks in the classroom.

1. Interrupt Learners When They Make A Mistake Or Error When:

• You want learners to be accurate concerning new structures.
• The majority of learners are constantly making the same error.

2. Give Delayed Feedback In The Following Situation:

• If the aim of the activity is fluency and communication.  
• Make a note of errors and correct them later on.

3. Don’t Correct Some Errors At All When:

• It is in the middle of group work or role play.
• A shy learner is daring to communicate.
• A learner is trying to express a complex or personal idea.

4. Correct Learners In Different Ways According To The Tasks Given, For Example:

• During fluency activities, errors are totally ignored.
• If the aim is accuracy, you might correct it more frequently.

5. Vary Your Correction Strategies According To Learners’ Personalities By:

• Correcting shy learners less, and encouraging them to communicate.
• Correcting stronger learners more, so they are challenged.

6. Help Learners To Self-Correct Or Correct Each Other’s Errors By:

• Making a gesture, stopping learners, and giving a question.
• Indicating the nature of the error, by saying e.g. past tense.
• Stressing the incorrect form.
• Repeating the sentence with a questioning intonation.
• Asking other learners for the correct form.
• Asking one of the learners to write errors and correct them at the end of activity.

7. Make Use Of The Main Advantages Of Self-Correction And Peer Correction:

• You know how much learners do and do not know.
• Learners feel more confident and independent.
• Learners know where they are.

8. Avoid The Main Disadvantages Of Self-Correction And Peer Correction:

• Some learners might feel superior to others.
• The same two or three brilliant learners might answer and dominate the class interactions.
• The one who is corrected might feel frustrated.

9. Give Feedback On Written Work By:

• Using correction symbols and asking learners to correct them.
• Correcting specific errors providing correct answers for them and leaving other errors.
• Praising the writing of some learners and getting them to exchange their copies with others

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