Corrective Feedback in Language Teaching

Corrective Feedback in Language Teaching

Introduction

Corrective feedback is a process by which teacher makes a necessary correction by providing the student feedback. This feedback can be formal and informal. For a teacher giving the feedback is necessary because without corrective feedback a student cannot perform as he could. There are six types of corrective feedback; all methods have their own benefits (Bitchener et.al, 2005). The purpose of writing this paper is to understand the importance of corrective feedback in language teaching. We will also discuss the topic with some examples in this paper.

Discussion

Corrective Feedback

In the field of education or pedagogy and in learning the corrective feedback is one of the frequently used practices. The corrective feedback process involves the comments and feedback, either formal or informal, from the teacher or peer regarding to the performance of the student in various tasks that have been taught by the teacher. The activities, related to the learning that takes place outside the institute and realm are heavily relying on the corrective feedback. Corrective feedback is the formal or informal information to a student or a group of student about their actions, behavior, strategies, style etc and how these things are affecting and perceived by others. The purpose of the corrective feedback is to bring a positive change and effectiveness (Panova & Lyster, 2002).

In language learning the corrective feedback does not have a big impact as it merely leaves the underlying competence untouched and affects performance. Corrective feedback helps the language learners to identify the gap between the target form and their erroneous utterance. Some scholars oppose corrective feed back in learning a language because it impede the communication's flow and put negative effects on the learner. Corrective feedback in learning and teaching the language is to identify the gap between the actual grammar that should be used and the grammar that has been used by the learner. The teacher usually gives informal comment to the students to use right form of verb and tense for the situation during the conversation. A formal remark is also given on written assignments regarding to the mistakes of pronouns, tense and compound sentences. The corrective feedback can be positive or negative. The positive feedback is one in which teacher comments with the words “Yes” whereas the negative corrective feedback is one in which the teacher replies with the word “No”(Schulz, 2001).

Student's Uptake

Uptake refers to immediate response of learner to the corrective feedback in utterance. Recast is a best method to reduce students uptake, in which a contaent is repeated by teacher in a grammatically correct way. Uptakes are least likely to occur when teacher follow the Recast method of ffedback than other methods.in second language content-based class most of the times students do not notice recast but they think that teacher is responding to the content not the form. For example

Learner: why you don't like Zac?

Teacher: why don't you like Zac?

Corrective Feedback as a Most Useful Tool

According to Lyster & Ranta there are 6 ...