Importance Of Feedback In Teaching A Foreign Language

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In teaching a foreign language in general and English in particular, one of challenge that teachers have to face is teaching writing skill because it requires the students’ knowledge about a relationship between meaning and form…Therefore, to teach writing effectively, “giving feedback is an effective way to train students to become better writers because it helps students to correct their own mistakes and be independent ones” (Ken, 2004, p. 98). There are many types of feedback and they can be distributed based on some following factors such as the performer(the provider) of feedback, the timing of feedback, the form of feedback, the method of performance of feedback, the concentration on a specific item in feedback, the stage of process writing…show more content…
In other words, it is the comments, questions, and suggestions a reader gives a writer to produce reader based prose as opposed to writer based prose" (Keh, 1990), as "information on performance which affects subsequent performance by influencing students' attention to particular matters so that those matters undergo a change in the subsequent performance" (Lamberg, 1980) or we can simply understand that feedback is the useful response to authors from readers. Feedback has an important role in teaching all of four language skills, especially writing skill because of some reasons. First of all, it helps students distinguish their performance is good or not (Mi, 2009; Littleton, 2011). Secondly, when their performance is not good, students take corrective action about their writing from the further feedback to improve it and achieve an acceptable level of performance (Getchell, 2011). In addition to monitoring students’ progress, feedback also encourages them to take another’s view and adapt a note to it. (Asiri, 1996). Last but not least, feedback is an encouraging way to help students not to consider what they write as a final product; they can write multiple drafts and reread their writing as much as possible in order to make a much improved piece of writing (Asiri, 1996; Russell&Spada, 2006). Depending on students’ proficiency level and the…show more content…
A number of studies are about the effectiveness of direct feedback. Chandler (2003)’s results of her study involving 31 ESL students on the effects of direct and indirect feedback strategies on students’ revisions is direct feedback was the best way for producing accurate revisions and preferred by the students as it was the fastest and the easiest way for them to make revisions. Another results of a study on the effects of direct corrective feedback involving 52 ESL students in New Zealand was conducted by Bitchener and Knoch (2010) where they compared three different types of direct feedback (direct corrective feedback, written, and oral metalinguistic explanation; direct corrective feedback and written metalinguistic explanation; direct corrective feedback only) with a control group is that each treatment group outperformed the control group and there was no significant difference in effectiveness among the variations of direct feedback in the treatment groups. From the above statements, it can be concluded that direct feedback is effective to be used in teaching writing. However, besides the effectiveness of direct feedback, there are some different researchers (Rymanowski and et. al, 2011; Ko and Hirvela, 2010) argued that direct teacher feedback is the least effective method of providing feedback on student errors and mistakes. Clements et al. (2010) reported that direct methods in providing feedback do not tend to have results

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