Giving feedback to foreign English students?

Question

Could someone please tell me how this is done. I am often told I am too passive with my feedback so would be grateful for any advice or tips. Is it necessary to correct the student mid-sentence or wait until the end. Should you correct the actual answer if it is wrong or just the grammar. Thank you.

Answer 1

borh

Answer 2

No, it's not necessary or advisable to correct somebody mid-sentence.

The person might lose his train of thought.

As for the kind of correction, it depends on what you're aiming at: fluency or accuracy.

The correction and feedback must come from the objective or goal of the activity itself.

Answer 3

I try not to correct my students in mid-sentence while they are talking. I wait until the person is finished and then say something like this, "Sandra, I am going to write on the board the answer you gave me. Then we are going to look at it and see what is wrong, and how best we can correct it."

I also encourage the rest of the group to join in and help in the correction. I am able to do this because I have told my class that NO ONE is to be laughed at and even a wrong answer is a learning tool. On written assignments, I want my students to write, write , write! I give them questions that many times require thought, and putting those thoughts into words. I do not get excited if words are spelled incorrectly. As long as they write and show me they are thinking, that is good. We then again, go over incorrect sentence structure in class, as a whole. This way, everyone learns. One other thing that I do is this, misspelled words are written in student journals. They then have to be looked up and a definition given, along with a sentence using the word correctly.

Answer 4

In order for a student to know where they go wrong u need to point it out.

With foreign students sometimes a word translated at a different meaning.

Let them finish and then tell them where they went wrong and how to rectify it.

Invite them to answer again.

1. Tell them what you are going to tell them

2. Tell them

3. Tell them what you told them

Answer 5

This article might be useful:

Answer 6

Its better to wait until the end of the sentence is written. Wrong answer is marked as wrong. For grammar part the answer is corrected according to grammar mistakes.

Answer 7

From personal experience I'd advise a lot of patience - let them finish and then back-track, explaining where, how and why the English has been mangled.

Problem is, many foreign students learn English the hard way, from basic grammar before coming to England to practise usage .

Which can be very confusing for them, when they find colloquial English is rather different to what they have been taught back home in Hong Kong, Beijing or Dehli.

One of my foreign students was totally flummoxed when she returned from college and I asked "So what have you been up to today ?"

Took me some 30 minutes to explain I wasn't being ungrammatical - saying 'what' instead of 'where'.

She seemed rather annoyed I was giving free English lessons, as her Landlord, but undermining her firm grasp of grammar.

As taught abroad.

The way I dealt with it was to lighten things up with a lot of humour.  The Asians in particular seemed upset to find their grasp of English was less than adequate - seemed to think it meant 'loss of face' - a major embarrrassment.

A cultural difference.

You and I might think our inability to speak more than a few words of French, Urdu, Punjabi,Mandarin or whatever, rather amusing (my Mandarin is rubbish) but many foreign students of English take it very seriously.

Which is why I lightened things up - told a lot of jokes - until they grasped the point of English humour, the way we miss out words or fail to complete sentences (to fool the Germans and annoy the French).

I assume similar applies in other languages, but I know little of such.