Key Concepts in ELT
Feedback
The term originates in biology and refers to the
message that comes back to an organism that has
acted on its environment. In biology it describes a
neutral process, a link in the chain of action and
reaction. I would like to divide up feedback in
language teaching into several areas, the first being
the second-language speaker’s feedback to self.
Feedback to self as a speaker
It is clear from introspection and from observing
others that a speaker is continuously collecting
feedback on her speech production, adjusting syntax,
grammar, and pronunciation as the river of sounds
carries forward. Time and again a second language
speaker will quickly self-correct, or sometimes make
wrong what was first right! This lightning-quick
internal feedback system, this monitor, much written
about by Krashen and his followers (Krashen and
Terrell 1983), is constantly at work, and often seems
to be looking out ahead beyond the words currently
being produced and foreseeing future rocks and
shoals. This monitorial predictive ability accounts for
many of the avoidance strategies in intermediate and
advanced learners’ speech. These are linguistically
efficient, but can also stop a learner venturing beyond
her present level of competence.
A speaker offers herself much more language
feedback than we are scientifically aware of. Ask a
learner of a foreign language to give you a couple of
words she really likes in the language and she can
usually do this instantaneously and, after a moment’s
thought, tell you why. Learners like and dislike
certain words and grammar structures, and for plenty
of reasons. There is clearly a wide area of language
feedback to self that is below the habitual threshold of
consciousness.
Feedback to self as a language learner
Bernard Dufeu (1994) asks his students, at the end of
an intensive day, to lie in a state of relaxation on the
carpet and let the language heard or seen during the
day swirl back through their ears or flit back across
their mental screens. His aim here is to have what the
unconscious mind has stored swim back into
awareness. The student in this exercise is answering
the question ‘what have I taken on board, what
language has oozed in through my pores?‘.
When my students finish a course I ask them to write
ELT Journal Volume 48/3 July 1994 © Oxford University Press 1994
letters to themselves in the following week. In this
way they can give feedback to themselves, the only
person who has an absolute right to feedback. (The
letters are sent to wherever they will be in the next
week. and are not seen by me or anyone else in the
group.)
Peer feedback to a chosen other
This is what happens spontaneously when two friends
from the same class discuss what they have
understood about what they have been doing in class.
It is also what happens when two teachers exchange
feedback in the staffroom about a particular student.
This feedback is non-hierarchical and is wanted, at
least by the feedback giver.
Peer feedback to the whole group
This happens when a class has a student planning
committee meeting to decide how the next part of the
course is to be run. The teacher is out of the room and
has told the students that their decisions will be
binding on her. The students assess the previous part
of the course and decide how best to use the teacher,
within her limits, as they perceive them. This
feedback situation has been engineered by the teacher
(enforced democracy) and is not spontaneous, though
many spontaneous things may be said in the
discussion.
Individual student feedback to the teacher
Caleb Gattegno (1976) claimed that individual
student-teacher feedback is at the centre of all
teaching. The student says something in the target
language that gives the teacher feedback on exactly
what she. the student. can or can’t do. The teacher
then gives her a new cue or frame that leads her to do
what she couldn’t do a moment before. For Gattegno,
language feedback from the student is adequate and
sufficient material for all language teaching.
Individual feedback from the student to the teacher
may be public (e.g. Maria is always late) or may be in
public but of a covert nature (e.g. a student who
disturbs the teacher’s concentration in a story-telling
session by firmly but silently and undemonstratively
not listening). Individual feedback may also take the
form of a private communication, like a one-to-one
talk after class or a letter. In terms of language, all
written homework that is handed in is individual
feedback to the teacher.
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Teacher feedback to the student
This happens in many different ways: error
correction, how close the teacher comes to the student
physically. the teacher’s voice features in talking to
the student, the teacher’s fielding of student doubts
and questions. etc.
Teachers’ unconscious feedback will include
projections. fantasies, and hidden demands:
Think of a class you currently teach: quickly write
down the names of all the students in the group.
Who heads the list? Whose names can’t you
remember? Why that order? You are quite
possibly giving feedback to your students in quite
powerful ways that you are unaware of. You may
be surprised that X comes at the end of your list.
but maybe she would not be!
The problem with this feedback situation is that it is
parental by nature, with power on the side of the
feedback provider. How often does a learner have to
put up with language-corrective feedback that she
does not want or feel ready to absorb at that particular
moment? From the learner’s point of view much
teacher feedback is ham-fisted, though it has to be
socially accepted as the teacher is seen to be doing her
job in offering it.
Similar problems attach to other forms of
hierarchically-downward feedback, be it inspectors
sitting in on classes or trainers offering trainees
lesson criticisms. Feedback is seriously deformed if
the recipient does not want it.
Third party feedback
At the end of a course some institutions ask the teachers
to give out feedback forms to the students on how the
course has gone for them. In such end-of-course
feedback students are asked to communicate with
people they sometimes barely know about their own
performance and that of the teachers. It is an odd
situation, in terms of feedback, odd because the aim of
this feedback is to improve the course for the next batch
of students, not for those who have given the feedback.
Feedback is central to any attempt at learner-centred
teaching. It is the central, guiding element. Its place is
harder to determine in a syllabus-focused course, or
one lifted straight out of a coursebook. The areas in
which feedback can affect the process are reduced,
and the teacher is less free to respond to what she
feels. hears, and sees in the group.
Modern marketing theory suggests that the best way
to develop new products is by asking potential clients
what they think they need. The slogan is: ‘Collect
feedback and act on it.’ Learner-centred teaching
works in much the same way.
Mario Rinvolucri, Pilgrims, Canterbury and the
Cambridge Academy
Further reading
Dufeu, B. 1994. Teaching Myself. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Gattegno, C. 1976. The Common Sense of Teaching
Foreign Languages. New York: Educational
Solutions.
Krashen, S. D. and T. Terrell. 1983. The Natural
Approach: Language Acquisition in the
Classroom. Oxford: Pergamon.
Register
The concept of register comes under the larger
concept of language variation in applied linguistics.
According to some applied linguists there are two
main types of variation in language, i.e. variation
based on the user of language, and variation based on
the use of language (Gregory 1967). Dialects,
idiolects, sociolects, and genderlects are examples of
the first type. while the language of science and
technology. legal English, the language of buying and
selling, and the language of classroom interaction
belong to the second type. The term ‘register’ has
been used to refer to variation according to the use of
language, i.e. functional varieties.
According to de Beaugrande (in Ghadessy 1993) we
can find some rough equivalents of ‘register’ in
foundational linguistic works, i.e. Pike (1967) refers
to ‘the universe of discourse’, and Firth (1957) talks
of ‘restricted language’. However, it was Halliday
(1978) who eventually gave currency to the term
‘register’. Halliday defines register in the following
way:
Types of linguistic situation differ from one
another, broadly speaking, in three respects: first,
as regards what actually is taking place; secondly,
as regards what part the language is playing; and
thirdly, as regards who is taking part. These three
variables, taken together, determine the range
within which meanings are selected and the forms
which are used for their expression. In other
words, they determine the ‘register’.
(Halliday 1978:31)
The above three dimensions of register have been
referred to by Halliday and others as the field, the
mode, and the tenor of discourse. Thus, the
fundamental purpose of register analysis is to uncover
the general principles which govern the range of
variation, i.e. to find out ‘what situational factors
determine what linguistic features’ (Halliday 1978).
Register analysis has been developing very fast in the
last few years. Many people are now working with
examples of genuine texts in the hope of establishing
the linguistic features that characterize them. This is
the focus of two recent publications (Ghadessy 1988,
1993). In the first of these, for example, Halliday
Key concepts in ELT
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