Exploring effective teacher feedback as a threshold concept in ELT

Abstract Summary

Abstract :

Teacher feedback is the information that teachers give to students on how they are doing regarding their understanding of a subject matter or performance in a learning activity. Effective teacher feedback facilitates student uptake by engaging students in the feedback and lead them to act. However, novice as well as experienced teachers have been reported to either grapple with the idea, struggling and trying to give one or two suggestions to their students, or fall short of providing quality, learning-enhancing feedbacks. This study proposes that effective teacher feedback is a threshold concept as novice teachers’ understanding of it is able to transform their conception of teaching and help them progress in their ELT practice. In this study, four middle school English teachers participated in stimulated recall interviews using teacher feedback episodes from recordings of their lessons, during which their understanding of effective teacher feedback was explored. The interviews were audio-recorded and later transcribed into written form, which were analyzed using Grounded Theory analytic process. Findings show that the four teachers have different understandings of effective teacher feedback, which reflects the three stages of the understanding of threshold concepts. Teachers in the pre-liminal stage link teacher feedback to positive reinforcement: they emphasize a lot on giving encouragement and affective support to the students. Teachers in the liminal stage focus their feedback on the learning process, such as task strategies or scaffolding. And teachers in the post-liminal stage think about how to give feedback that lead to students’ uptake, i.e. how their feedbacks can provide students with opportunities and means to act on in order to improve in future learning. This research provides a glimpse of how threshold concepts in ELT can be explored and examined, and manifests that it is a useful perspective for ELT teacher education curriculum development.

Pre-recorded video :