Providing feedback on students’ language use is potentially one of our most important roles.
Students benefit most when corrective feedback is given within a meaningful context, and when they are developmentally ready.
In fluency-led lessons, teachers can cast their net wide and focus on a whole range of emergent language. Among kind of grammatical errors most worth paying attention to are systematic ones, “structures that learners appear to be newly producing with some frequency” (Diane Larsen-Freeman, 2003).
In this context, so-called recasts have been shown to be particularly effective (as long as students are paying attention!) because:
👉 They can be part of natural discourse; they’re a kind of input
👉 They are “hot” (in the moment)
👉 The student is invested in the exchange / message / task
👉 They don’t need to interrupt the communicative flow
👉 They don’t have the affective force of a correction
👉 Students’ attention may be “freed up” to focus on language form.
Do you use recasts? What other feedback techniques do you find most effective with your students?
