Teaching Tip 8: Feedback

How:

1. Ask one of the students what the answer to question 1 is. If s/he gets it right, fine. If not, ask if anyone else knows the answer. (If nobody knows and nobody can guess, you'll need to give it to them).
   
   
2. Ask one of the students what the answer to question 2 is. If s/he gets it right, fine. If not, ask if anyone else knows the answer. (If nobody knows and nobody can guess, you'll need to give it to them).
   
   
3. Ask one of the students what the answer to question 3 is. (Are you getting the hang of this?)
   
   
4. In the "True or False?" activities on my worksheets, the feedback questions would be: "How many of your guesses were right?/How well do you know your partner?/Which of your partner's answers surprised you?"

Why:

1. Getting feedback from the students (i.e. information about what they've just done) means you can check how they coped with the exercise. You don't only need to get the answers. You can find out if they liked that type of exercise or not - if not, can they suggest ways to improve it?
   
   
2. You can check their pronunciation. You can deal with queries. You can allow the feedback session to develop into a class discussion, if you like. Whatever.

Extra info:

You can initiate a feedback session about the lesson as a whole as a filler (five-minute activity) to fill the last few minutes of a lesson by asking the students to decide which of this lesson's activities was the most enjoyable/useful and why, then compare their choices with their partner's or have an open-class discussion about it where the whole group talks to you and airs their views.

© Liz Regan 2003