Editorial
The text was first published in a modified version in “The Teacher” Magazine, Poland, issue no 1, January 2014, pp. 40-43, and issue no 4, April 2014, pp. 56-60 ISSN 1644-2059 (The Teacher: NR1 (115) 2014, NR 4 (118) 2014, INDEKS 374385), www.teacher.pl , www.sklep.teacher.pl
On Feedback and Error Correction
Consuela Popa, Romania
Consuela Popa is an English teacher. In the past she used to teach English and French. She has taught in state schools, high schools and secondary schools, at all levels, and different profiles. She is interested in linguistic research, cultural studies and writing in English and in the study of other languages: French, Spanish. Christian theology, sociology, psychology are her other fields of interest. She cherishes a lot the opportunity of writing for HLT, since the attitudes and values discovered this way help grow and feed the spirit. As artists, linguists should be aware of the fact that interdisciplinary aspects are unavoidable and that we should touch a variety of fields through our writing. E-mail: konskris2001@yahoo.com
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Teaching, learning, feedback and language acquisition
Language acquisition, fluency and accuracy
Skills, practice, accurate and professional feedback
Teaching approach, feedback and rapport
Skills practice, evaluation and assessment; testing skills
Assessment criteria, productive and receptive skills, devising assessment scales
References
Teaching means much more than just the multitude of teacher roles that we adopt throughout our teaching sessions or instructional programs. Teaching has got a perennial value, and it must be understood in its extremely complex and beyond time frames, without delineation limits.
The ultimate goal of “teaching” or pedagogy is not to “instruct” or “train”, nor to “tame”, our trainees, in a machine like manner more precisely, in order to “cope” with instructional sessions or learning sequences, throughout limited periods of time, but the ultimate goal (or if you wish, everlasting goal), of teaching is to inculcate deep, authentic, lifelong values and attitudes. It is through these values and attitudes that as learners, we achieve everything, thus teaching is not to be perceived as merely some “patchwork” or isolated sequences of teaching, learning, evaluation, feed-back, appreciation, and whatever else you might wish to call all those processes. It is a lifelong process. In my sentence above, I mentioned that as learners, “we” achieve everything, since I obviously perceive ourselves, teachers and our whole job as a continuous process of learning, of shaping and of training ourselves, I do not perceive teaching and learning as a dichotomy, but rather as two sides of the same coin, as a continuous flow.
However, somehow in between these notions, teaching and learning, some voices from the educational field usually placed feed-back, assessment, evaluation or/and testing, as also a necessary and requested process. I must admit that, faithful to my personal vision of teaching, learning and assessment/evaluation as being a continuous circle, a structure of intrinsically linked and extremely important components, I see assessment and evaluation, I see feed back as intermingled, intertwined between teaching and learning all throughout as a process with different facets. And of course, within the “thorny” or touchy aspect of “learning”, I also include, in an overlapping manner especially when it comes to our linguistic field, acquisition, as a concept that has been so many times subject to a lot of research and reflection, and even big polemics and controversies in the field of language acquisition/foreign language, target language acquisition.
If I am to state briefly, feed-back is first, in my opinion, as a pedagogical concept, a naturally occurring and extremely important phenomenon in pedagogy. We give feed back as teachers, whether we are aware of it or whether we are unaware of it, just like we also receive feed-back from our students, in many ways. And we thereupon feed further, with information and experience regarding the learning and teaching process, our teaching sequences, that become a whole of intricate relationships and cease to be just isolated “themes” or “areas, or mere teaching sequences, with little, if any, connection between themselves.
The pedagogical contexts and phenomena are to be seen as a continuous system in which teaching, learning, feed-back, assessment, evaluation, are linked components in a living body. This living body is a body of learners and teachers alike, a body that is extremely active, reacts and interacts, sends out messages, receives messages back, and feeds this system forward with that whole amount of information, reintegrates all information gathered within further pedagogical situations, to the benefit of, in our case, language acquisition and learning. We build the health of the pedagogical body through a strong and intricate scaffolding of relationships, of stimuli, replies, of complex reactions and we build these healthy relationships upon the information that is transmitted and reintegrated in a feed-back-feed-forward cycle or conundrum. I have mentioned “conundrum”, because to me, the three components of the pedagogical cycle, teaching, learning/acquisition, and evaluation/assessment/feed-back (with feed-back here in our view as a main concept), cannot be clearly separated and cannot function unless they are all seen as a whole. And this is supposed to be like a puzzle. Teaching, learning and evaluation make up a beautiful chain in which feed-back generates feed-forward, and through our feed-forward we push our instructional/educational program further.
The “feed-forward”, as a pedagogical concept, is often defined as being any information and set of further decisions that are to serve as a generator of progress (and future, crucial, decisions) for teaching and learning development. Based upon our individual and general feed-back that we perform as teachers, we are able to promote the feed-forward as a tool for further development and progress of both learning and teaching. These concepts are full of riddles within themselves. We could accept, for instance, that “good teacher feed-back is one that generated good feed-forward for our teaching/learning/evaluation process”. Also good feed-forward means that we have an informative “past”, full of pluses, that satisfies our principles as teachers and we are therefore very confident to move on and achieve a lot of things.
A very important aspect that needs to be mentioned here is the existence of some closely linked and compulsory principles. Those principles are, in language acquisition and language learning methodology, exposure to language, and hence, listening as a primordial skill. Listening as a primordial skill is given its due emergency, together with speaking and the developing of all language skills towards academic proficiency/perfection. These skills should be mingled together in such a way that the concept of “language fluency” should not, under any circumstances, be hindered, thus, we should not be pretending to build anything else in terms of other language “skills”, at the expense of fluency. Indeed, the comprehensible input (i+1), that has been so frequently mentioned about in methodology has got its vital share of contribution, and priority, still, whenever we aim at achieving language mastery.
In other words, no matter how “artistically”, or fit, or methodologically accomplished, we might pretend to be training our students in the writing and reading skill, however, the dual, receptive-productive couplet, that of listening and speaking, should always come out or intervene as communicative traits of our language training program. We should always be ensuring that there is enough language exposure and oral production and that oral fluency is not somehow jeopardized as through too much focusing upon our strategic “skills” plan.
I need to add, also, that the “communicative” traits above are not to be understood in their controversial and distorted manner. We should remember that among the teaching approaches and trends, the communicative one has been, unfairly in my opinion, turned into some overly pragmatic and absurd interpretations that end up by completely denying the serving of its very obvious sense, that of language fluency and use benefit.
The error correction matter has been put forward so many times because it is known that “correction” hinders fluency, or the developing of fluency, especially at lower levels, but also in advanced levels, when it is wrongly used, overly used, or misunderstood. And it is within this context that we discover the huge difference that the concepts or notions of “feed-back” and “error correction” can embrace. In other words, we should be giving professional feed-back, in our teacher role, and not “correct” mistakes, or “hunt for” them.
Especially at lower levels, when language exposure and comprehensible input should be ensured by all means, “error-correction” comes to interrupt the language flow or utterance that is due to take place, or, if you wish, that is due to be “formed, “shaped”, or to be “educated” upon language learners. (I tend to rather hate or avoid the term “enforced”, even though, it is known, that at lower levels, the tension is so high in order to generate good “understanding” of linguistic habits that it almost gathers a coercive dimension).
We should also be aware of the fact that the coercive factor was a “prerogative” and a badly used ingredient of the behaviorist trend in its negative acceptance. Also, the feed-back and error correction issue brings forward another famous couplet, to call it like this, if not dispute, which is the fluency versus accuracy issue.
The fluency versus accuracy issue, apart from numerous implications within the language acquisition field that it may have, comes to highlight our error correction and feed-back issue. We aim at ensuring that our students acquire language in such a way that both the speaking/communicative ability should reflect very good mastery of that language, while at the same time making sure that through the written as well as spelt code (and there is oral spelling/pronunciation, as well as written spelling), we have also achieved proficiency, mastery and perfection for our language learners.
Today we base our language learning and teaching upon a variety of methods from past to present, combined together in such a way that they should serve the purpose of language acquisition and learning optimally. There are skills lessons, in which we practice and “drill” each aspect more or less separately or in combination/integration with other skills; here we can have special error correction lessons or sequences, or we can call them feed-back sequences, if you hate the word “error correction” as teacher
practitioners. In such writing or speaking practice lessons or sequences, we are able to set exercises, listening and speaking skills lessons, multiple choice, quiz, dual choice, true or false, fill in the blanks, cloze type of practice sets, where mistakes or slips are to be dealt with in particular by the teacher. Through such a multitude of exercises like the above presented, we have the opportunity to see our learners performing in speech, to grasp their level of listening comprehension, to figure out how they deal with writing or English in use aspects and how their brain perceives the structures of language, discourse type, textual and above the text level, topics, also word order, stress, fall, intonation, pitch. Punctuation is also given attention in the best way through these types of exercises and accurate details are perfected. In such cases the teacher feed back is necessary in a more focused manner, and errors or mistakes are given special attention. We can decide and agree also, together with our learners, whether there is any need for special correction codes and convenience, like when we correct such mistakes in an obvious manner(in traditional, communist if you wish, old way of feed-back), or we mutually agree upon a gentler way of error correction or feed back. We are to choose here the manner in which we score, grade, mark or allot/grant points to our students` drilled items, how we highlight such errors (colors, letters, symbols, etc), and how we discuss or reflect them in class within the learning groups later on.
Then, there are integrative or general type of lessons, like those lessons where everything has to flow and it really flows, and therefore, the issue of error correction becomes much more delicate then we might have thought. In such cases, it is recommendable that we should aim, as much as possible, at simply abolishing error correction. Subtle feed back, under diverse forms, such as repetition, echoing, gentle correction, are to be “administered” in such cases.
The whole process of communication and interaction in such type of lessons is meant to ensure that, as it has been said before in methodology, “language learning or use will take care of themselves”. Thus, no need for error correction to be made and for interruptions with that view in mind, since language use and language performance are to be seen as continuous opportunities for self-development and group development as a whole, as well; this development will come naturally, it will evolve well, provided that exposure to language, (the comprehensible input i+1), as well as the integration of all skills are done properly. (For readers who are not aware of the comprehensible input (i+1) concept, or convention, this has been agreed upon to be named so in methodology, so that it should mean the amount of language exposure that is being offered to learners, which needs to be even a bit above their assumed comprehension level, (hence, the i+1 symbol).
This kind of language infusion is supposed to help learners develop their language, while at the same time, in the type of lessons as the above discussed, integrative/language flow type ones, the error correction issue is to be definitely avoided through another type of feed-back, given either very gently during the course, or rather later on, at especially agreed /convened time.
Moreover, language being a miracle, and language flow being absolutely necessary to be carried on and on, the fluency versus accuracy dispute comes back as a recurrent theme and we can only realize the huge gap that there is between fluency and accuracy. Since language flow is absolutely necessary, we will therefore be extremely embarrassed, if not jeopardized, in our language mastery efforts, by this intercession through focusing upon accuracy, through error correction. It is later on that we will set special class sessions and practice to explain, highlight and draw attention towards the accuracy phenomenon and towards our students` language use with professional details. Keeping in mind that mistakes are a necessary phase onto language development, we are able to discriminate between developmental errors and persistent mistakes or errors. That is why the issue of feed-back on language accuracy comes to the forefront as an extremely delicate one, especially when we are placed in the realm of fluency.
Within the previous sections of my article, I have stressed the fact that feedback on language accuracy is a very delicate aspect, especially when we are in the realm of fluency. Feedback on language accuracy becomes no longer a more or less isolated issue, but it gathers a global dimension, since language is an integrated system. Language mastery comes with the successful integration of all skills, therefore, feedback as a vital methodological aspect must be seen not as an isolated or sequential factor, but as an integrative one.
We must integrate all skills in order to achieve language mastery or competence. Hence, the often acclaimed language “competence” or language “competencies”, if we refer to the multitude of language abilities and aptitudes that shape together successful language proficiency. The way we respond to each and every one of these language teaching and learning instances, as educators, and overall, the way we respond and integrate all our responses, makes up successful or unsuccessful feedback.
The circumstances, the types of skills that we enhance, the level, whether it is more advanced or less advanced, the multitude of techniques and strategies that we deploy, or simply the general manner in which we understand to respond to our learners` needs, all these, determine the needed type of feedback that we must provide for our learners. On a more abstract, theoretical, level, I must admit that, as a teacher and methodologist, I perceive the notion of feedback as making up, besides the multitude of responses that we give to our learners, also the multitude of techniques and strategies that we develop and employ throughout our instructional series, throughout our teaching and evaluation processes altogether.
Our overall methodological approach, if you wish, is characterized by the way we use these techniques and strategies within our instructional program; the way we use all these and we feed back and forward from these techniques and strategies determines the general kind of feedback that we give or have during the teaching and learning process. Whether we give good or bad feedback illustrates how we integrate all our methods and responses within the frames of our teaching approach.
Feedback represents success, the success that we have as educators towards our teaching goals. If the feedback is good, we do not only achieve success in our teaching program, but we are also connected with our learners and with their actions throughout the teaching learning process, we establish rapport. We produce or “reap” good “fruits”, fruits that mirror the healthy relationships that we build throughout the pedagogical process. Feedback and success are not just about some “final” results, visible achievements. Feedback and success are also about the way we approach our teaching and about the numerous links and relationships that prove that, as teachers and learners, we are all unique, but at the same time we must work together as a community of language professionals and adepts and we must perceive ourselves as a body, as a whole. Language is about communication, with different meanings, purposes, values, feelings and spirits conveyed, so in communication there is not just one side. We must think of “involvement” and “integration”, of co-opting others as key words into that.
However, when speaking about the integration of all skills, we should not neglect mentioning that, although the language instructional programs should be focused upon the successful integration of all skills, as stated before, as within an obviously systemic phenomenon, the due attention and emergency to each language skill (without discrimination, as much as possible), is also a valid requirement. This above statement is not a contradiction. We should draw our attention and focus towards each language skill through specific activities and language skill training instances. In other words, while it is absolutely true that, as skilled teachers, we are to build and join together all four skills judiciously, the way in which we treat the training of our learners in each skill, in a specific manner for each respective skill, is also a matter of vital importance. Listening, speaking, reading and writing, have each of them, their specificities and we should discriminate well when we set a certain language skill lesson in focus, so that our learners should acquire these specificities in the best way.
We must draw attention towards the right methods and techniques when teaching listening, for instance, or when we wish to encourage our learners to delve into their listening practice more and more throughout the teaching sessions. Knowing how the teaching of each of these skills goes in terms of teaching advice, pace, further tasks, etc, makes the difference between professionalism and amateurism. I have mentioned “listening”, above, but the same dedication should be applied to all the other skills. Whenever we wish to stress the importance of a certain skill, be it listening, speaking, reading or writing, we should be aware of the fact that, individually, if we do not master the right and specific techniques, strategies and procedures needed in order to develop an activity of that kind with the enhancement of a certain skill in view, we fail to build all bridges needed for successful results. Of course, nobody is perfect and time does not always allow us to reach our goals in an ideal manner, although we can always be the best of whatever we are, and even more if we only wish to.
One direct link from the skills practice issue becomes that of evaluation, assessment or testing. There are different types of testing, depending upon the teaching instances that we have been involved in, and upon the instructional period of time of the specific language program. Not forgetting about the important balance between formative testing and summative testing, we are therefore sent onto the delicate realm of skills testing. If we aim at assessing everything about language level and mastery, we must bear in mind the systemic and integrative character of language teaching and learning, as mentioned before. We can have discrete point testing or integrative testing. We can have direct testing and indirect testing, and we can have subjective and objective type (more or less), of testing.
However, we can still notice another paradox within the subjective versus objective type of testing. When, for instance, we have writing as a skill in view, we can notice a twofold purpose for testing writing: when we test writing in terms of literary and academic skills, creativity, etc, in composition shape, and when we test writing as English in use.
Of course, the writing skill tested through what we generically know as English in use, does not mean only some spelling evaluation. It means a broad assessment of linguistic abilities and performance, far above what we can call just some acceptable fluency level; that is, grammar, mastery of linguistic structures at the text level and far beyond the text level, discourse level, both properly/literally and figuratively; we need to understand far beyond what we could call some “lexical chunks”, in order to gain excellent comprehension and performance level in English; English in use testing is therefore meant to give us a broader picture on truths that lie deeper than some spelling surface for a medium or average level of English. Also, what is harder, when the level increases, is the fact that English in use is meant to discover the learners` ability for analyze and synthesis, in the extended scope of our textual situation, from the linguistic as well as contextual (i.e, the subject that is being treated in the text), cultural, point of view. English in use testing is supposed to be as objective as possible, and if the marking scheme, the detailed marking scheme can insure that we have reduced the possibility for errors in scoring as much as possible, then our English in use testing is reliable.
As many teachers probably already know, the main requirements for a test are reliability and validity. Validity refers to the content/thematic/subject validity that the specific assessment is supposed to embrace. That is, we cannot possibly have a valid test if we ask our learners to give linguistic solutions based upon a text that presupposes specialized knowledge in a scientific or other area that learners do not have much clue of. Similarly, test reliability as a feature designates the situation when the thematic requirements of the test, along with the formulation of the test questions, and the detailed marking scheme conception and items, are aligned together in a healthy relationship that makes the whole structure of our test function well. Thus, objectifying our testing/assessment marking scheme becomes an essential goal. There is nothing more harmful and poisonous for a presumed or so-called objective type of test, especially, than an erroneous detailed marking scheme.
Of course, on the other hand, we know that subjective testing, which is represented by the way we test productive (writing in particular) skills, should be made as language friendly as possible through some special means of “objectifying” its subjectivity or “subjective” feature, so that again, our testing should be as reliable as possible. Within this scope, that of what methodologists have branded as being “subjective”, in terms of evaluation type, lies, in my opinion, a more subtle language acquisition angle. Below, I shall try to explain what, in my opinion, from the wider scope of language acquisition, language fluency and mastery would have to mean.
First, generally speaking, there is a reasonable, globally expected perception of language mastery or fluency that can be noticed or perceived at someone`s speech level and that contains some criteria that can be broken down in subsequent elements through which we are able, as auditors, testers, etc, to grasp reliable information about our students` level, pronunciation level, discourse structure mastery, grammar level, vocabulary knowledge and choice, cultural level, context adaptability, previous schemata on the subject; we can also obtain paralinguistic and extralinguistic clues from our students.
Then, there is another situation. This situation comes when we can no longer appreciate or assess someone`s speaking level based upon the previously mentioned grasping of the generally expected language fluency level. We must therefore, in order to categorize different forms of speaking, really understand the importance of devising assessment scales or performance descriptors, in order to feel confident about our specific evaluation method. Speaking as a performance skill can be broken down into some indicator components. These indicator components are, as we see in specialty treaties, pronunciation, intonation, fluency, accuracy, pitch, tone. The order of these is not meant to reflect their importance, and as everything progresses, we are able, until the end of the discourse, to make an idea about the value of the speech, about the overall effect that everything that has been said has had upon us, about the way in which it was rendered.
Breaking down evaluation descriptors is not meant to abide by some old fashioned and one sided views: for instance, it is already known in methodology that proficient language speakers can still pronounce some words in their own manner, that is, with some (more or less), bearing of their mother tongue accent, or of regional, local accents, spirit, even for native speakers in very diverse and multicultural environments.
Each mother tongue, regional accent, dialect, have got their own specificities, and different accents, strength, tonalities, can be perceived from underneath the target/spoken language flowing and expression.
Speaking, along with writing, are productive skills. However, each of these skills has got their own features. Both of them reflect the learners` own individuality, their spirit, voice, personality traits, approach, views, perception. Speaking and writing also come along in the shape of different ranges or registers, types of discourse, styles, etc. Speaking and writing have got, somehow, a rather odd character from the point of view of their subjectivity. We tend to always assess them in a more or less subjective manner, since however objective our devising scales might be, when we think about our measures in order to objectify our subjective assessment scales, there will still be certain aspects quite difficult to ignore: production as speaking or writing will always reflect some unique, original voice and patterns that cannot be properly appreciated and respected unless we try, as listeners and as readers, of the conveyed messages, and ultimately, as testers, evaluators, to transpose ourselves into the person and world of the learners that convey those messages. This way, our testing method, assessment scales, criteria, will overlap the message features of the sender, in either its written or spoken form. It will fit into our aim towards gaining a view over our learners` competencies and our own teaching objectives.
A marking scale for the speaking skill would have to balance the following elements: grammar, vocabulary, pronunciation, coherence, fluency. Normally, a grammar knowledge gap is not to be penalized twice, just like vocabulary gap, or a pronunciation issue. Fluency is a very important feature and it is also directly linked to coherence.
In my opinion, an acceptable level of fluency also implies a considerable vocabulary amount, as well as grammar in use ability on a reasonable level. That is why, when devising and writing such a marking scale, we should pay attention not to set the balance of fluency against grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, in an unfair way.
In other words, we need to be able to weigh these elements very well, since once we have noticed a reasonable fluency level, in our learners, we need to pay attention to the way we perceive their slips or errors throughout the speaking session. Once we have noticed their fluency during their speech, we should not mark grammar or vocabulary, for instance, or even pronunciation, by having as a benchmark a certain criteria or image in mind about how a paper with grammar and vocabulary in focus should look like in terms of accuracy. This would disturb or misadjust the elements to be weighed on the whole, and create disequilibrium and contradiction with respect to our previously agreed scoring of fluency and coherence on the whole (general impression). What happens if we try to reformulate this? What would it mean? If you think about the fact that this means that the teacher should be as humane or humanistic, if you wish, as possible, you might be just right! For me, this is not just a feature of being “humane”.
It means being professional in assessing and in scoring, it means being able to feel all about the general level of one learner, it means using our linguistic charisma, if you wish, and intuition, in order to serve our learners, the benefits of evaluation. I strongly argue that, once we have weighed, based upon our intuition and experience as teachers, in a masterful or crafty way, the overall fluency and coherence issue, we have already included the other elements, like grammar, vocabulary, and pronunciation, into our (wise) consideration, and therefore, when we move on to score them, we should only “penalize” the candidate speakers within the wider frame or context of the whole discourse flowing, that is, in a “positive” way. Thus, it should seem obvious that the whole issue of professional feedback and error correction should lie within some oxymoronic parameters, like the two keywords above, “penalize”, and “positive”.
From the point of view of language acquisition, we need to weigh and consider general fluency first, and discourse flowing, and only afterwards, detect and analyze in a more detailed way whatever lies behind the surface of our learners` speech, what their strengths and weaknesses are, in terms of different aspects of English in use, in terms of grammatical structure perception, in terms of vocabulary level or pronunciation. We always need to act as healers, as good doctors, as artists, casting a professional eye and lending a good ear to our learners, to their performance. The only thing we are prohibited to do is act as butchers. The word, manifested in its heard or written form, has got tremendous power, and whenever we listen to certain messages, of any kind, or whenever we see and read messages, we uncover human spirit and its development and anamnesis.
Krashen, Stephen, D. Principles and Practice in Second Language Acquisition, Prentice Hall International, 1987
Krashen, Stephen, D. Second Language Acquisition and Second Language Learning. Prentice-Hall International, 1988
Krashen, S (1985). The Input Hypothesis: issues and implications. Longman, New York
Lambert, W.E (1972), Language, Psychology and Culture, Stanford, UP
Corder, S.P (1967), The Significance of Learner`s Errors. International Review of
Applied Linguistics, (5)
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