The aim of the present paper is to connect the theoretical foundations of oral and written feedback in ESL teaching to the practical activities that take place in my classroom. The class in question is a writing course attended by nineteen students of diverse cultural backgrounds: primarily Indian but also Chinese and Middle Eastern. In such a context, written feedback on student work is a more efficient and effective tool as it serves both formative and summative assessment purposes, saves the instructor’s time, and helps students solidify and retain their knowledge.
Given the substance of the course, most assignments completed by the students are, naturally, related to writing. Deciding on the type of feedback to provide to students can be quite a challenge: written feedback tends to be more time-consuming and open to interpretation, meaning that misunderstandings can arise in the process. However, as far as oral feedback is concerned, most classrooms do not provide adequate settings to provide it to students (Celce-Murcia, Brinton & Snow, 2014, p. 232).
In my classroom, the choice has been made in favor of written feedback. The decision was made primarily because of the nature of comments that are provided on written work. While students also learn about the structural dimensions of writing, most of the provided feedback is still corrective as it aims to address grammar and spelling mistakes made by the student. Such feedback should be as explicit as possible for it to be effective (Sheen, 2010, p. 228). Generally, all the mistakes can be classified into several categories for which the professor has developed a system of notations that is easily understood by the students. The instructor favors written feedback as it also allows students some time to reflect on it (Sheen, 2010, p. 204).
The written feedback, however, does not come from the instructor alone as the students are encouraged to provide peer reviews and responses to each other. Thus, not all of the written work is always graded: at the peer review stage, students mostly provide qualitative feedback to each other instead of addressing specific mistakes. Such an approach serves the formative purpose, meaning that it is intended to promote student learning over the course of instruction (Celce-Murcia et al., 2014, p. 322).
While written feedback is the predominant approach in my classroom, oral feedback is also used as a supplementary tool. To a considerable degree, oral feedback is intended to address the structural deficiencies of the student’s work, such as the organization and structure of their paper. Oral feedback is provided during individual meetings so that the students can immediately respond to the comments. Moreover, the instructor takes notice of general mistake trends and addresses them in the classroom.
References
Celce-Murcia, M., Brinton, D., & Snow, A. (2014). Teaching English as a second or foreign language (4th ed.). Boston, MA: National Geographic Learning. Web.
Sheen, Y. (2010). Differential effects of oral and written corrective feedback in the ESL classroom. Studies in Second Language Acquisition,32(2), 203-234. Web.