Reflection Paper

This week’s reading articles focus on feedbacks and both as a language learner and teacher, this issue is always intriguing and controversial.

Compared to writing, feedbacks on one’s speaking skills to me are somehow more complicated and require more attentions. For language learners in an ESL setting, every life details can be treated as a way of examining one’s speaking skills and for those native speakers who might not have educational training background, their feedbacks can be a trigger of the students’ loss of faith in practicing. Obviously there is no way to train every native speaker to “correctly” react to language learners’ speaking, however, it is the teachers’ responsibility to guide the students as well as inspire them from the conversational failures of their daily life.

Besides focus on the discussion of how to give feedbacks to students, language teachers should also consider the feedbacks the students gave after they received feedbacks. There is a great possibility that some students take all feedbacks as a final judgment, this is especially usual with students of introvert personality and particularly happened about their attitudes towards writing. For writing activities focusing on content other than grammar, the misuse of grammar may generate misunderstanding of the contents. As the presenter of Truscott’s article which is completely against the opinion of grammar correction, I understand he had the concern that the focus on grammar correction might cause the loss of focus on content. However, in my opinion, the grammar form is actually a guarantee of clear understanding of the content. Through the process of grammar correction, teachers might find the vague expressions concerned with one’s content. This might be a great way for students to analyze his or her own writing and extend his or her voice of the writing.

I still believe that in EFL setting, the relationship between student and teacher should be more trustworthy. One way to build this tie is to figure out the right way to give feedbacks. As a non-native speaker of English, the correctness of my feedback also takes a great account of my whole efforts. However, language study as a humanity science, there are a lot of points in it are actually subjective, especially in the process of review of one’s article or presentation. One might have totally different opinion towards the same article but is it fair to say, I don’t like your opinion so I don’t like the whole article? Of course not. But in some activities like literature review, such processes are somehow unavoidable. On the other hand, these days more and more scholars began to throw light on the objective exams like TOEFL and GRE arguing whether this “cold yet fair” method can actually reflect the student’s language level. I agree the “feedback”, which is the fierce score, is always the most obvious and thought-provoking way to motivate a student. But is it against the nature of language study?