0001

Mistakes and

feedback

In a widely cjiiotec! study, Faul Black and Dylan Wiliam found that feedback on students’work probably has morę effect on achievement than any other single factor (Black and Wiliam 1998). Such formative assessment (sęe page 379) is, they believe, ‘at tbe heart óf effective teaching’ (1998: 2). They bascd this assumption on a'11 extensive reading of thc researdh evidence available to them. Richard Cullen agrees, showing how the teacher’s ‘follow-up movcs’ whcn a student has said something ‘play a crucial part in clarifying and building on the ideas that the students express’ (2002:126). It is importanl, therefore, to make surę that the feedback we give is appropriate to the students concemed and to the ąctivity they are involved in, and that we recognise feedback as a crucial part of the learning process.

A Students make mistakes

One of the things that puzzles many teachers is why students go on making the same mistakes even when those mistakes have been repeatedly pointed out to them. Yet jtol: all mistakes are the same; sometimes they seem to be deeply ingrained, yet at other times students correct themselves with apparent ease.

In his book on mistakes and correction, Julian Edge suggested that we can divide mistakes into three broad categories: ‘slips’ (that is mistakes which students can correct fhemselves once the mistake has been pointed out to them), ‘errors’ (mistakes which they cant correct themselves - and which therefore need explanation) and ‘attempts’ (that is when a student tries to say something but docs not yet know the correct way of saying it) (Edge 1989: Chapter 2). Of these, it is the category of‘error’ that most concerns teachers, though the students’‘attempts’ will tell us a lot about their current knowledge - and may well provide chances for opportunistic teaching.

It is widely accepted that there are two distinct sottrces for the errors which most, if not all, students display.

• Li ‘interference’: students who learn English as a second ianguage already have a deep knowledge of at least one other Ianguage. Where that Li and the variety of English they are learning come into contact with each other, there are often confusions which provoke errors in a learner’s use of English. This can be at the level of sounds: ikrabie, for example, does not have a phonemic distinction between Ki and /v/, and Arabie speakers may well say ferry when they mean very. It can be at the level of grammar, where a students first Ianguage has a subtly different system: French students often have trouble with thc present perfect because there is a similar form in French bul the same time concept is expre$sed slightly differently; Japanese students have problems with article usage because Japanese does not use the same system of reference, and so on. It may, finally, be at the level of word usage,

137