Thursday 4 September 2008

Trude Heift on feedback and learner uptake

I am listening to Trude's interesting presentation about corrective feedback and its effect on learner uptake. Trude emphasises the need for longitudinal research in the area as student behaviour towards feedback changes during the duration of a course. What can be perceived as exciting feedback at the beginning of a course, may become utterly boring and uninteresting after having been repeated too many times.

She presents the results from a longitudinal study with 24 students of German. The learner uptake is affected by how the learner is guided in correcting his/her mistakes, but it seems clear that it is easier to correct mistakes with spelling than with grammar. Simply because the spelling mistakes are more straightforward to fix than grammar mistakes. I hope that Trude will comment this posting since I think I've left out some very relevant aspects to the issue.

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