There are many different ways of giving feedback to our students. I tried much of them and faced many different reflections from them. For some students it is very important to check their speaking and writing mistakes at the moment of these activities, but there are also some students who prefer written, I mean e-mail form of feedback. They read my feedback thoroughly and try to correct them immediately.

I've recently been doing some research on when / what kinds of feedback are most effective. Here's a summary table of recommendations ...

Theoretical approaches

Reform/Direct Method: errors should be corrected orally by teacher (correct version repeated without explanation).

Communicative Language Teaching: error correction should be infrequent during production activities, only correct if the utterance is incomprehensible.

Situational Language Teaching: errors should be repeated for student to correct self.

Total Physical Response: less correction at start of learning, later occasionally help ‘fine tune’ utterances.

The Silent Way: only gestural feedback to manipulate learners’ utterances until correct, no oral intervention.

Community Language Learning: monitor accuracy of learner utterances, give positive, supportive feedback.

Audio-Lingual Method: feedback/correction necessary to develop stimulus-response reactions in learner.

Textbooks/Teaching Guides

Bolt (1971): correcting errors inhibits learners’ creativity: try to formulate correction constructively/encouragingly.

Littlewood (1992): praising successful utterances important to encourage successful communication. Correction distracts from meaning and should be avoided during meaning-focussed activities.

Hewings (2004): use modelling (with facial gesture) to correct pronunciation. Develop separate materials to correct repeated errors.

Brown & Yule (1983): focus on correctness. Form of feedback/correction is based on analysis of why utterance wrong (e.g. guess/mistake/lack of knowledge).

Dunlop (1970): no need for explanations in corrections – inductive approach with examples.

Harmer (2001): immediate correction important in accuracy work, but not every mistake. Teacher offers opportunity for self-correction without interrupting fluency work with negative/positive feedback.