How often do you provide feedback to your students after they have done an IELTS writing or speaking activity? Do you focus on giving information about errors they made? Do you provide information on other aspects of their writing? Do you think you provide quality feedback?
Feedback is so important for students preparing for IELTS. It helps students understand what they can do and what they need to improve. Some people in education are also promoting the idea of 'feed-forward'. They say that feed-forward has a stronger emphasis on what a person should do when faced with similar situations in the future. Whether we call it feedback or feed-forward, providing quality information to students, which helps them develop and improve, is necessary.
You can read more about the reasons for good quality feedback and find useful language structures in the article on our website for teachers (see below for link). But, here are some tips for creating good quality feedback for IELTS candidates:
•Use the criteria from the band descriptors to create your feedback – this helps you decide look at the piece of writing in an objective way
•State what was successful – it's amazing how students can grow in confidence when teachers tell their students that they could understand their writing (even if there were mistakes everywhere!)
•Show examples of expressions/sentences that students should continue to use because they were successful – some teachers use highlighter pens to do this in individuals' writing or collect examples from each student and show the examples to the whole class
•Ask students to produce a piece of writing but tell them that in feedback you will only comment on one of the criteria, for example, Coherence and Cohesion. This works especially well if you teach large classes as it reduces your workload a little bit.
•Identify specific areas for development – again use the criteria from the band descriptors to do this. Be specific and realistic. Productive features (Task achievement and response/coherence and cohesion) are usually easier to fix than linguistic (lexical resource/grammatical range and accuracy). Linguistic knowledge takes time to master.
•Use technology to provide feedback (see next article)
Feedback is more than just a score. Good quality feedback helps us go further. It shows us what we should be doing. It points us in the right direction.
If you have an opportunity to come to one of our workshops, we explore this topic in more detail.
Additional reading: Language of positive feedback
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