Does the type of feedback affect learning outcomes?
Graduation Thesis
Presented to
the Faculty of the Department of
English Language and Literature
Notre Dame Seishin University
In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirement for the Degree
Bachelor of Arts
by
Chisa Nishida
2015
Contents
Abstract
Chapter One: Introduction
1.1 Introduction1
1.2 The learning circle5
1.3 The role of error6
1.3.1 What are errors and mistakes?6
1.4 Feedback8
1.4.1 Feedback qualities and attributes10
1.4.2 Types of feedback11
1.4.2.1 Positive feedback11
1.4.2.2 Negative feedback11
1.4.3 The effect of feedback on performance13
1.4.4 The teacher assessing student’s performance13
1.4.5 The way of feedback16
1.5 Memory17
1.5.1 Working memory17
1.5.2 Long-term memory18
1.6 Learning motivation20
1.7 Research Questions21
1.8 Summary21
Chapter Two: The experiment
2.1 Introduction23
2.2 The experiments24
2.2.1 Introduction to the experiment24
2.2.2 Method24
1) Subjects
2) Test design
3) Procedure
2.3 Results26
2.1 Summary31
Chapter Three: Discussion
3.1 Introduction32
3.2 Summary of the results32
3.3 Discussion of the results32
3.4 Answering the research questions34
Research question 1
Research question 2
3.5 Implications35
3.6 Limitations of the Experiment35
3.7 Further research36
3.8Conclusion36
References37
Appendix39
Abstract
Most people acquire their first language unconsciously. On the other hand, when we try to acquire the second language and foreign language, we learning that language consciously, sometimes we need some effort. Then, for thelearning process we are often are given feedback by teachers or peers. The feedback is necessary in not only for second language learning but also other types of studying, and feedback relates to other aspects of learning like the learning process, memory and learner’s motivation. However, there are severalkinds of feedback and how to give it to the students, so teachers need to care about how students feel and are motivated, as well as how the teacher gives feedback to them.
In Chapter2, we explained the process and the result of the test and the questionnaire. To examine the appropriateway to give feedback to learners, Notre Dame Seishin University students were asked to take the test. They memorized 20 Italian words and were givenreceptive and productive tests twice, and then they answered the questionnaire. After they took the first test, they were given positive or negative feedback, and next time they took the second test to see how the effect of positive or negative feedback given to them.
In Chapter Three, we discussed the results of the tests and the questionnaire in detail. Also, the research questions were answered. The most important finding is that positive and negative feedback affects learners both positively and negatively, and learners are motivated or demotivated by each feedback. In this experiment, the learners who were given positive feedback got higher score than those who had negative feedback. However, there are more learners who prefer positive feedback to negative feedback, so the learners should have feedback which suitseach person.
1
Chapter 1 The Role of Feedback
1.1 Introduction
We acquire a lot of things through our life, and often get feedback when we learn something like study, sports, working and so on. Although we can acquire first language easily, Japanese people can’t acquire English as well. In school, students usually study various subjects and have classes, therefore they are given some kind of training to complete theirtasks like classwork, tests and homeworkgiven by teachers. Through their learning, students often make mistakes and their teachers correct them, occasionally they continue to make mistakes. This process is a natural apart of second language acquisition. In order to teach second language effectively, every teacher tries to understand how language is acquired by learners. Therefore, the language which a learner is exposed to is a fundamental component of the learning process.
Depending on the type of each teacher’s feedback, students feel frustrated, aggressive,demotivated or happy, glad and motivated. Therefore, whether the learner gets positive feedback or negative from the teacher can affect the student's goals
1.2 The Cycle of Learning
Figure 1: The Cycle of Learning
In all current theories on second language learning comprehensible input, which is provided through listening or reading a text, is seen as a fundamental component of the learning process. Another component which is required for successful second language learning is output. Merrill Swain (1985, 1995, 2005) argues that comprehensible output plays an important role in second language acquisition since it is the most effective stimulus for the development of the interlanguage. Swain argued that learners notice that they are not be able to say what they want to say in the target language when it is only during the production of the second language. Swain’s claim, and that is the “forcing” of the learner to produce language. It means that by motivating the students to carry out special learning tasks requiring interaction and by giving them instant feedback, the teacher is encouraging language production to play the main role.
1.3 The role of error
1.3.1 What are errors and mistakes?
Learners often still make mistakes even if their mistakes are corrected. Edge (1989) suggested three categories of mistakes; slip, errors and attempts and some types of feedback.
●“Slip” : a kind of mistake which learners can correct by themselves once the mistake has been pointed out to them because they previously knew the rule.
●“Error” : mistakes which they can’t correct by themselves and which therefore need explanation. They didn’t know how to correct it yet.
●“Attempt” : that is when the learners try to say something but does not yet know the correct way of something it yet.
It is an “error” that the teachers are most concerned about, and “attempts” tells teachers about the students’ recent knowledge and provides chances for opportunistic teaching. There are two obvious causes of errors.
●First language interference
These errors occur when the person who has had already a deep knowledge of at least one language, learns a secondlanguage. There are often confusions in a learner’s use of second language because the student’s first language has a subtly different system. For example, Japanese students have problems with article usage because Japanese doesn’t have the same system of reference. Therefore, at the level of usage, where similar words have slightly differentmeanings like Librería in Spanish means bookshop, not library. It is different from English. We call these false cognates.
● Developing errors
When children often start by saying things like Daddy went which is correct, however then they start saying things likeDaddy goed and they comed. This happens because the child starts to ‘over-generalize’ a new rule that has been subconsciously learnt. As a result, the child even makes mistakes with things which children seemed to have known before. However later, children begin to have more sophisticated understanding, and they become to say went and came again. In this way, they become to handle regular past tenses. Foreign language students make these kinds of developmental errors as well such as “He is more taller than her.” The acquisition of more for comparative is over- generalized and they mix it up with the rule which the students have learnt.
1.4 Feedback
Feedback is interaction that makes the learners aware of their true or false knowledge of the language, and provides the model for incorrect use of second language. Explicit feedback (Birdsong 1989; Gass, 1988;White 1991) may take a form of direct correction like telling that he or she is using incorrect words or incorrect grammatical structures and follow this up with an explanation in how to use the word correctly. Implicit feedback (Doughty and Varela 1998, Oliver 1995) is a form of indirect correction which has strategies such as,
●Confirmation check: the use of an expression to derive their confirmation that learner’s sentence or vocabulary have been correctly heard and understood (e.g. Is that what you mean?).
●Clarification requests: the use of expressions to clarify the meaning of the utterance (e.g.What did you say?).
●Comprehension check: the use of expressions to check the utterance have been understood ( e.g. Did you understand?).
●Recast: the rephrasing of the incorrect utterance using correct form while maintaining the original meaning.
Learner: John bringed by book.
Teacher: Oh, John brought your book, did he?
Feedback gives learners opportunity to concentrate on their inter-language production and comprehension, and it also helps them to notice their gaps in their knowledge.
We can categorize the two types of feedback; Positive and Negative. While learners are learning something in various ways, feedback is an effective way to encourage each person and to provide learning experiences provided the feedback is positive and constructive, and it will help learners to learn the correct forms. When the students make mistakes, teachers have to decide the most appropriate way to give feedback for each person. How can teachers give feedback to students?
Figure2: Feedback needs to be planned.
1.4.1. Feedback qualities and attributes
This section will look at various qualities and attributes of feedback as suggested by Race (2001).
● Timely. It should be as soon after making the mistake as possible.
Ideal feedback should be received within a day or two, and even better almost straightway, if possible. This can be achieved, for example, in some computer-aided learning situations and equally in some face-to-face contexts.
● Intimate and individual. Feedback needs to fit each learner’s achievement, individual nature, and personality so that they don't feel negative and aren’t demotivated.
● Feedback should open doors, not close them. In respect, we have to be particularly careful with the words we use when teachers give feedback to students. Clearly, the use of”weak” or “poor” causes irretrievable breakdown in communication between assessors and students. However, positive words like “excellent” can cause problem as well. When the feedback on subsequent work is only “very good”, the learner can think why wasn’t excellent again. In such cases, it is better to praise exactly what was very good or excellent in little more detail.
● Manageable. There are two sides to this. One is from the assessors point of view; designing and delivering feedback to students can easily consume all the time and energy teacher have, it is an endless task. However, the other is from student's point of view; getting too much feedback can result in them not being able to manage the important feedback from the routine feedback, reducing their opportunities to benefit from the feedback they need most.
To give appreciate and effective feedback to students, there are some significant points.
When the teachers give feedback at the appropriate time, they need to considerthe individual stage of learning, and being concerned with the student’s feeling, they need to choose wordsat an appropriate distance. However, teacherscan consume a lot of energy to do it and getting too much feedback can have a deteriorating effect on students, so the degree of opportunity is important, too.The teachers do not only give feedback simply, but they need to pay attention to provisions for feedback.
1.4.2 Types of feedback
1.4.2.1 Positive feedback
Positive feedback is giving the reaction to evaluate the action from the person positively. It is the acting to tell students that they are correct. There are two kinds of positive feedback such as “praise” and “accept their corrective answer.” Examples of praise are “Nice”, “Well done.” “Excellent!”, and accepting corrective answer is like “Yes”, “Ok”, “That’s right.” There are few people who feel bad when they are given positive feedback. The people who aren’t used to being praise can’t accept positive feedback well.
1.4.2.2 Negative feedback
Negative feedback sometime called critical or corrective feedback. This is a way to tell learners that their answer is not correct and suitable, and it is more acceptable for the elements of feedback which are not just praise and affirmation. Negative feedback is divided into two types; One is “explicit ” which teachers tells learners directly and the other is “implied” which teachers do it by intuition.
● Explicit negative feedback
Example of explicit negative feedback include teachers telling learners “You made a mistake.” In addition, sometimes the teacher makes learners think about their mistakes.For example:
Learner: I was take this picture.
Teacher: Pardon?
Learner: Oh, I took this picture.
Another way is for a teacher to keep silent for a few seconds when the learner makes a mistake, and then s/he corrects the mistake for all learners of the whole class.
● Implied negative feedback
In this type of feedback, teachers correct their mistakes naturally in their conversation.
Learner: I wasn’t know how many friends come today.
Teacher: Ok. You don’t know how many people do.
Teacher says the correct, and most appropriate expression and the learner can realize their mistakes.
Of course, there are the learners who don’t notice their mistakes, teacher’s corrections, and the people who make mistakes repeatedly.
Fishbach, Eyal, Finkelstein (2009) stated that ‘A number of theories attest either positive and negative feedback is generally more effective. Several theories attested that positive feedback is more effective for motivating goal pursuit than negative feedback because positive feedback increases their confidence, and leading people to except successful goal attainment. Negative feedback undermines people’s confidence in their abilities that they pursue their goals. ’ (Atkinson, 1964; Bandura & Cervone, 1983; Lewin, 1935; Weiner, 1974; Zajonc & Brickman, 1969). ‘Other motivation theories make the opposite prediction, suggesting that negative feedback increases motivation more than positive feedback. Positive feedback on success may provide a sense of partial goal achievement, the signaling that less effort is needed to accomplish the goal. In contrast, negative feedback on lack of success signals that more effort needed and encourages goal pursuit’1998; Higgins, 1987; Kluger & DeNisi, 1996; Locke& Latham, 1960; Powers, 1973)
There are several opinions about positive feedback and negative one. These feedback types have features individually, so it can be shown different effectby learner’s character or their level of learning.
1.4.3 The effect of feedback on performance
Since the beginning of the century, feedback interventions (Fls) produced negative, but largely ignored effective on performance. Meta-analysis suggests that Feedback Interventions improved performance on average. Bangert-Drowns, Kulik, and Morgan (1991) found that there is wide variability of feedback on performance, although feedback positively related to greater achievement in most cases but over ⅓of the Feedback Interventions Feedback Interventions decreased performance. The key feature of effective use of feedback is to encourage “mindfulness” in student’s responses of feedback. Kluger and DeNisi (1996) found Feedback Intervention effects on performance are quite variable has been disregarded by mostresearchers of Feedback Intervention , however several Feedback Intervention researchers have recognized that Feedback Interventions have highly variable effect on performance recently. In some conditions Feedback Interventions improve performance, in other conditionsFeedback Interventions have no apparent effects, and in others Feedback Interventions debilitate performance.
Theirempirical researchmay provide the necessary information to mitigate the persistent and unreasonable belief that FI always improvesperformance (Pritchard 1989). FI can provide a large positive effect on learner’s performance. It leads learners to have familiar task and supports learning. (DeNisi and Kluger 1996).
1.4.4 The teacher assessing student’s performance
Black and William (1998) found feedback on student’s work probably had more effects on achievement than any other single factors and it is crucial part of the learning process. Learners are given feedback from the teachers and peers. However, this thesis will focus on a teacher’s response to a learner’s work. Students are likely to receive teachers’ assessment in terms of praise or blame. One of the teacher’s roles is to encourage their students by praising their work, and praise is vital component in a student’ motivation and progress. Petty (2004) investiagtedthe teacher’s response to the learner’s work, and he suggested two parts of response to student’s work and calls these ‘Medal’ and ‘Mission’
“Medal”: what we give students for doing something well
“Mission”: the direction we give them to improve
The teachers should try to give reinforcement to each student, and they need to focus on what students are capable of doing, it is not against the group as a whole. It is true that students respond well to teacher’s praise, however they have to do it well, otherwise it may prove counter-productive. In first place, if teachers give ‘over-praise’ to students, they may create ‘praise junkies’ (Kohn 2001), the students who get too familiar with the praise were blinded by the progress they are actually making. Secondly, students become to discriminate between the praise which is properly given and medals that are given carelessly. They need to understand the reason for teacher’s approval or disapproval. Williams and Burden (1997) also point to the ineffective of blame in the learning process.
Zhang and Rahimi (2014)stated that teaching approach to student’s work is divided two types (Krashen, 1982, 1985). These are Meaning-focused and Form-focused teaching approaches.The former supporters believe that exposure to comprehensible input( positive evidence) of second language. It will lead to the acquisition of second language items and they advise against the teaching of negative evidence like explicit correction of error. On the other hand, the latter uses negative evidence including corrective feedback, and it lets learners notice the gap between the target language and theirinterlanguage.Interlanguage means the language which a common language used byspeakersofdifferent languages. This is the first step for developing interlanguage for learners.
The assessment has to be handled properly because indiscriminate praise and blame can have little positive effect, and actually it may be negative, however the combination of appropriate praise with helpful suggestions about how to improve will a much greater chance to student’s improvement.