Before you start this section, read the following comments taken from samples of marked work. How effective do you feel they are? How much information or help do they give students?

There is a danger with feedback that it will be perceived by students as final and damning, suggesting that there is no hope of sufficient improvement to redeem the situation. (Besides being far too brief, the first three examples above fall into this category). Feedback, even on the weakest piece of work, should hold out some prospect of the student being able to retrieve matters, otherwise why should he or she bother? This is what Race (2001a: 87) calls feedback 'oriented to opening doors, not closing them'. Similarly, able students will not be able to progress further unless we tell them what is good about their work and which aspects can be improved still further. (The last two comments in the box above are fairly meaningless for this reason.)

In brief, feedback needs to be:

• specific, ie give particular examples of what was wrong and what was good;
• clear, ie use unambiguous comments, however brief, rather than inexplicable ticks or squiggles; if you use a system of annotations (eg Appendix 4 - and see also Module 14, section 14.2.5), be sure students have a copy of and understand the scheme;
• remedial, ie indicate how things can be improved; but obviously this needs to be realistic as it is unusual for a fail mark to become a first next time round;
• prompt, ie as close as possible to the date of submission so students can still recall the process of doing the task and their thoughts or intentions during it;
• flexible, ie students may want to talk to you in person about certain things and there needs to be some mechanism for this;
• personalized, ie most of your comments should be specific to the individual student's work; even if you hand out a model version, each script ought to receive personalized comments.

Now consider the following two extracts from an interview with a school teacher and a cri de coeur from a student. What issues do they raise for us and how would you respond to them? Click on the 'Commentary' button following the extracts for some feedback.

Tutor voice 4

Tutor voice 5

Commentary

Student voice 5

Commentary

When giving feedback, it is important to avoid both excessive metalanguage (some students may not understand it fully, even though you may have explained it to them) and sarcasm (not everyone will share your sense of humour). It is also a good idea to try to balance negative comments with something positive on at least one aspect of the work. Indeed, comments might usefully start with the positive. Consider the following, for example, taken from an essay written in a Department of German and awarded a low mark of 45%:

It is a moot point whether feedback such as this should always, sometimes or never be given in the target language. Departmental policy and individual preferences will vary on this. If it is done consistently and typical terms are explained to students early on in the course, there should be no problem. Clearly, the level of the group's proficiency will dictate how much students will understand at first but the more it is done, the more readily students will adapt to it and accept it as part of normal target language use. (see also Module 14, section 14.4.4, on target language testing.)

One time-honoured approach to providing feedback is to link written correction and annotation of individual pieces of work with whole-group oral feedback, in which recurrent or particularly problematic aspects of performance are dealt with collectively. Discussing common weaknesses in this way is an effective method of providing formative feedback, but it also avoids personalizing negative comments and thus embarrassing individuals. Students will recognize which errors are theirs and take note of comments, but they can do so in a safe, anonymous environment.

An extension of this approach is to provide an unattributed list of common mistakes and corrections on a sheet for distribution to the whole group. Alternatively, corrections could be omitted and the group required to correct all the errors themselves, possibly in pairs. This can be an effective learning experience, although it is important to ensure clear and comprehensive correction is provided to all students so they are not left in possession of incorrect exemplars of the target language.

Finally, Race (2001a: 88-89) provides a lot of good advice on the practicalities of feedback and you are advised to read this in full. The following summarizes some key points:

• Make your writing legible. If there is not enough room for comments on a student's work, use a code system and write feedback on a separate sheet (see Appendix 4 for an example; see also Module 14, section 14.2.5, for further examples).
• When you collect their work, give students an initial feedback handout (eg a model answer) while the task is fresh in their minds; then concentrate your marking on individualized feedback.
• Be honest: it's no good withholding the truth of their weakness from students. But if there are serious problems, eg a student is heading for failure on the module or is guilty of plagiarism, it is better to deliver such news personally so you can monitor how it is being received and offer support.
• If you feel students are not taking sufficient note of your feedback comments, return the work minus a mark and get them to work out an appropriate mark by the time of the next class, thus inducing them to read and reflect properly on all the feedback.
• Consider using audio tapes for feedback. In languages this might be especially convenient when marking oral tasks submitted by students on tape. Students like such personalized oral feedback and, since you can talk more quickly than you can write, you can probably give better quality feedback in this way, as well as modelling correct linguistic forms for students to listen to.