Direct and Indirect Feedback

Abstract The accelerating rate at which all climate variables are changing, and the expected further acceleration of these, combined with the failure to make deep cuts in CO2 emissions and to develop sufficiently effective carbon removal technologies means that solar radiation management techniques that directly cool the planet will increasingly be recognized as a necessary first line response to climate change. In this article, we discuss why the target for a deployment of solar radiation management technologies must be to cool the planet to within 0.5⁰C of the 1880-1910 baseline, which is less than the temperature rise that existed in the early 1980s. We use game theory, and the sub branch of interconnected games, to show that failure to deploy solar radiation management technologies that are capable of achieving these targets results in nations pursuing a free-for-all strategic position where protection of self-interest in the face of a crisis makes achieving significant and sustainable cuts in CO2 emissions impossible. We also show with game theory that there remains a high probability that a successful deployment of solar radiation management technologies will be overwhelmed by continued CO2 emissions unless there are fundamental changes to political structures that can integrate management of security with management of the climate change response. This has major implications for decisions on the governance of solar radiation management.

Matching the expectations of teachers and learners is vital for successful learning. Few studies have investigated the effects of corrective feedback on Iranian EFL learners. Therefore, this study aimed to bridge this gap. To this end, the sample of 180 male and female teachers, who taught language courses in an English Language Teaching program in language institutes in Zanjan, and 350 learners, chosen through stratified random sampling, formed the participants of the study. Two standard instruments were used in this study-PET Test and Fukuda's (2004) Feedback Questionnaire. The findings suggest that learners believed that corrective feedback had a significant effect on their writing but the teachers did not think so. It is concluded that most of the feedback given by teachers were concentrated on grammatical errors and that the teachers' views on feedback are based on the context, which might origin from absence of sufficient teacher training. With this in mind, giving feedback, or rather the right kind of feedback should perhaps play a better role in teacher education. The fact that feedback is based on each context may be positive as learners are different and teacher trainees might still take advantage from studying the provision of feedback.

This study is an attempt to investigate the Iranian TOEFL/IELTS teachers' written feedback practices and their perception of written feedback in writing classes. The examination of the questionnaires given to 30 TOEFL/IELTS writing teachers and the analysis of their written feedbacks on 300 students' essays indicate that although the majority of the teachers believe that they should provide feedback on the language (i.e., spelling, grammar, vocabulary, capitalization, and punctuation), organization (i.e., cohesion, coherence, and unity), and content of students' essays, most of their written feedbacks are concerned with the language of their students' essays. In fact, a discrepancy was found between the teachers' perception and their practice in the provision of feedback. In addition, although the majority of the teachers believed that they should give indirect feedback on their students' writings, most of their written feedbacks were direct. This lack of harmony between the teachers' perception and their practice in providing written feedback calls for more attention.

This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of direct and indirect written corrective feedback in writing skill in prep- class students. The study focused definite and indefinite articles. 9 participants was divided 3 groups randomly. Then 9 students formed two experimental groups and one control group, 3 groups in each group. One experimental group received direct feedback i.e, the correct form is written in students’ paper and the other experimental group received indirect feedback ie., an error is underlined in the students’ paper and control group did not receive any feedback. The statistical analysis indicated that direct feedback group outperformed both indirect feedback group and control group in terms of use of articles in English

The aims of this study were to investigate the relationship among different spoken repair fluency indices including repetition, replacement, reformulation, and false start, the effect of corrective feedback (CF) on repetition, the presence of a trade-off among spoken complexity, accuracy, and fluency (CAF), and the likely effect of CF on it. In a quasi-experimental design, four pre-intermediate intact classes, with male Iranian EFL leaners, were randomly selected as the delayed explicit metalinguistic CF (n = 17), intensive recast (n = 15), extensive recast (n = 16), and control (n = 16) groups and participated in spoken reproduction of story tasks for six sessions, and, based on the presence or absence and type of CF, their errors were treated differently. The results of the correlational analysis indicated that there were significant correlations among all fluency indices and repetition, with the highest mean and highest correlation, was chosen as the representative index of the repair fluency. Additionally, the results of the one-way ANOVA indicated that the effects of different CF types on repetition were insignificant. Finally, the results of another correlational analysis indicated that the correlations among CAF were statistically insignificant and different CF conditions had insignificant effects on them. It can be suggested that different spoken repair fluency indices measure the same underlying construct and measuring one of them suffice. Furthermore, since CF has insignificant effects on spoken repair fluency and there is an insignificant trade-off among CAF and it is not significantly affected by CF, teaching practitioners should not be concerned about the negative consequences of the provision of CF to develop EFL learners' spoken accuracy.

Acknowledging the difficulty encompassed in unambiguously defining the concept of "authenticity", this paper discusses the notion in the context of an ESP course at the Faculty of Engineering at UNER. The paper begins by briefly describing the course, and  then discusses text and task authenticity by examining the interplay between them, both in relation to content and classroom interaction and to their validity in terms of the programmes main aims and learner outcomes.

Assessment for learning in engineering programs is a central aspect
when trying to improve the teaching-learning process of future engineers who need to meet the new challenges of society. In this regard, we reformulated the objectives of the Differential Equations (DE) course to suit the desired professional profile. Our general objective is that “students work effectively in teams." The purpose of this paper is to describe a research study which was carried out in an undergraduate Bioengineering program by answering the following questions: Which activities could engage students in the assessment process and provide information about group dynamics? Laboratory assignments were redesigned to provide personal participation opportunities. Individual
contribution progress report instances and self-assessment and peer assessment activities were incorporated. The results allowed us to perceive the individual situation of students and, as a result of this, to improve the way we support them during their learning process.

This study investigates the effect of indirect written corrective feedback to Arabic intermediate students in Kuwait. There are 20 participants altogether in this study, ten male and ten female. They each wrote two assignments on the same topic. No feedback was received on the first assignment, and the second was conducted after indirect feedback was offered to them on the first task. The results show that indirect feedback is effective in improving their writing and language skills. The results also indicated a higher number of spelling errors than any other errors. The findings of this study suggest some teaching implications which include raising students' awareness of the need to avoid many writing errors. Teachers should not correct all students' errors, but should only correct those errors which are deemed necessary to correct. Teachers should also focus their attention on teaching and learning tasks, which concentrate on indirect written feedback rather than direct feedback. Again, as the leaners seem to have more problems with spelling errors rather than any other errors, teachers should devise strategies which concentrate on improving such errors, and writing correct words. This study advocates a large scale of studies which cover the wider context of Kuwaiti intermediate students.

This study investigates the role of peer interaction (PI) and peer corrective feedback (PCF) in developing EFL learners' grammatical competence regarding simple past tense. It is based on training university-level English preparatory class students in Turkey to interact with their peers and give oral corrective feedback to each other's target grammar errors during communicative tasks. Three classes (n=85) were randomly assigned to the peer interaction (PI) group, the peer interaction and recast (PI+Recast) group or the peer interaction and metalinguistic feedback (PI+MF) group. The PI group was only trained to do communicative tasks in pairs and did not receive any feedback training; however, the PI+Recast group and the PI+MF group were trained to give recasts and MF, respectively. Pairs of learners were audio-recorded while they were trying to complete communicative activities that required the use of the simple past tense. 21 hours of audio-recorded data obtained from the learners' dialogues were examined for instances of PCF. Furthermore, receptive and productive measures were used to identify the effects ofthe intervention. The findings show that the PI+Recast and PI+MF groups performed better than the PI only group in terms of receptive knowledge and accurate use of the simple past tense.

This study investigated the use of corrective feedback to address beginner Iranian EFL learners' pronunciation. Two groups of 15 language learners were randomly assigned to one experimental and one control group. While the control group just received common traditional method of pronunciation teaching, the experimental group received corrective feedback on their wrong pronunciation. The design of this study was pretest-treatment-posttest. The results of the pretests and posttests showed no significant differences between the control and the experimental group. The findings showed that (a) corrective feedback affected the learners' pronunciation of v sound and (b) corrective feedback did not improve w sound production.

This experimental study, using a pretest-treatment-posttest design, compared the effects of focused direct written corrective feedback and additional writing practice on L2 learners' written syntactic complexity. The participants were 60 Iranian elementary EFL learners, whose L2 proficiency as well as L2 writing syntactic complexity and accuracy were controlled by administering the Oxford Quick Placement Test and a paragraph writing test. They were assigned to two groups: Focused direct corrective feedback (FDCF) and additional writing practice without feedback (No CF). The investigation included five sessions and lasted for three weeks. Every session, each participant wrote a paragraph of descriptive type in class. The experimental group received FDCF, while the control (i.e. No CF) group was provided only with additional writing practice. Lu's (2010) web-based L2 Syntactic Complexity Analyzer was utilized to calculate the five indices of syntactic complexity measures, including mean length of clause (MLC), mean length of sentence (MLS), mean length of T-unit (MLT), clauses per sentence (C/S), and verb phrases per T-unit (VP/T). The MANOVA test revealed no statistically significant difference between the two groups.

Esettanulmány egy angol írástechnikát fejlesztő kurzus összetett oktatói értékelésének hatékonyságáról CSIBY ÉDUA BOGLÁRKA Bevezetés Az összetett, egymásra épülő oktatói értékelés és a különböző javítási módok alkalmazása hatékonyan képes működni az angolt idegen nyelvként tanulók írástechnikát fejlesztő kurzusán. A tanulók így képessé válnak, hogy egyénileg megtalálják a számukra megfelelő szerkesztési módot, amelyet következetesen és megbízhatóan tudnak alkalmazni. A kurzuson az írástechnika fejlesztésében a korrektúra-változat használata és a portfolió készítése kiegészítő elemként a többszintű értékelés hatékonyságát segítette. A korrektúra készítésével a tanulók önellenőrzési stratégiája fejlődhetett, mert így az írásaik félobjektív olvasóivá válhattak, és az értékelés első részét saját maguk alapozták meg. A jelen esettanulmány egy nagyobb kutatás részeként elsősorban az eltérő oktatói értékelés és a tanulók javítási módjainak hatékonysága közötti kapcsolat vizsgálatára tesz kísérletet. A tanulmány középpontjában az eredményes szerkesztési folyamat nyomonkövetése áll, az említett szempontok összevetésével. Továbbá elemeztem, hogy a szerkesztés folyamán a különböző írásos oktatói javítási módok értelmezése milyen mértékben volt sikeres a tanulók szempontjából. Elméleti háttér Az írásos javítási módok vizsgálata a kutatások egyik központi érdeklődési pontjának számít. Egyik első ilyen kutatás Truscott nevéhez fűződik, aki úgy véli, hogy a nyelvtani hibákra koncentráló javítás nem tartozik az eredményes értékelés közé, és akár káros is lehet, ha a diákok így a nyelvtani pontosságra koncentrálva törekednek arra, hogy sikeresebb írókká váljanak, és nem fektetnek hangsúlyt a szövegük stilisztikai és strukturális megformázására. 1 A jelen kutatás nem kíván a vita ilyen irányú részéhez szervesen kapcsolódni, hanem az értékelést egy tágabb keretben, konstruktív szerepében vizsgálja. Kifejezetten a különböző típusokra és a tanulói értelmezésükre koncentrálok. Bitchener, Young és Cameron úgy találták, hogy a vegyes értékelési skála jelentősen befolyásolta a tanulók teljesítményét és pontosságát. Megállapították, hogy a direkt szóbeli és írásos javítás együttes alkalmazása hosszú távon hatékonyabban segítette a helyes nyelvhasználatot, mint magában a direkt írásos javítás. 2 Ferris-hasonlóan a jelen tanulmány kérdésfeltevéséhez-a különböző típusokat vetette össze a tanulók sikeres alkalmazási módjaival, és arra a 1 TRUSCOTT 1996. 2 BITCHENER-YOUNG-CAMERON 2005.

In this short reflective article, I explore the issue of teaching academic writing skills to university students at a university in Western part of Japan. In particular, the article focuses on different means and modes of constructive feedback I deployed while teaching an academic writing course to second-year university students. Further, I will briefly describe what problems I encountered and how I tried to address those by exploring different ways of providing feedback to students based on their needs, learning styles/preferences, and abilities.