THE IMPORTANCE OF ERROR CORRECTION AND EFFECTIVE FEEDBACK IN LANGUAGE TEACHING

Аннотация

This thesis examines the process of giving effective feedback to the students after various types of assessment and its impact on students’ future progress. Furthermore, the most famous types of feedback, their benefits and drawbacks, choosing the most appropriate option according to the situation and level of students will be discussed. Key words: teacher correction, peer correction, self-correction, immediate and delayed feedback. It widely known that teaching and learning process is not only about introducing new topics and reviewing them. There are other parts of every lesson, which includes assessment, correction and feedback. Each skillful and experienced teacher should choose appropriate assessment type according to the students’ level, age, interest and preferences. After finding strengths and weak points teacher should work on them carefully, that leads next step error correction and feedback. However it is not easy process, which demands using effective strategies to make student more motivated and interested in this field. So, that means paying attention to this peculiarities also important part of every effective teaching process. “Mastering a foreign language involves making mistakes and errors, hence feedback and error correction is an integral part of any foreign language classroom” (Bakan et al., 2020: 9). Giving feedback and correcting errors is a crucial aspect of teaching and learning, especially in an English language classroom. Providing meaningful and constructive feedback can help students make improvements, increase their motivation, and boost their confidence. At the same time, giving ineffective or harmful feedback can cause students to become discouraged or demotivated. “It is important, therefore, to make sure that the feedback we give is appropriate to the students concerned and to the activity they are involved in, and that we recognise feedback as a crucial part of learning process” (Harmer, 2011: 137).1 There are several techniques that can be used to correct errors effectively in the classroom. However, teachers should keep in mind that giving feedback and correcting errors can be the most delicate aspects of foreign language teaching. Hence, it is vital for teachers to establish a set of principles that will help them decide on types of errors and situations that require corrective feedback as well as techniques that can be used (Bakan et al., 2020) The tutors in this program identified a number of challenges. Adapting and Catering to Individual Needs One of the greatest concerns for the tutors was adapting their feedback to varied proficiency levels. In general, the tutors reported having more difficulty with weaker students because they often had to read the text several times in order to understand it. Then they had to choose not only which errors to focus on and which corrective strategy to use, but also had to decide how to address complex linguistic features with simple explanations that the learners would understand. In addition, tutors who were determined to personalize their CF 67 YOSH OLIMLAR ILMIY-AMALIY KONFERENSIYASI in-academy.uz/index.php/yo found it difficult to isolate exactly which linguistic feature to focus on in order to help the learner improve. Another issue was the tutors’ concern that if they did not correct all the mistakes, the learners might think that what they had written was accurate, and they would retain these forms permanently. Some tutors feared that more advanced students, who were aware that they had made a mistake without necessarily knowing how to fix it, would judge them as incompetent or lazy if they had not flagged the error. Diagnosing Errors Correctly diagnosing the categories of error presented a challenge for some tutors, who reported spending considerable time and energy reading their grammar books. Tutors were also afraid of making mistakes themselves, of not understanding what the student meant, or of not providing accurate grammatical explanations. As Myhill (2000) noted, most second- language teachers are neither grammarians nor linguists, and their metalinguistic knowledge is sometimes partial or tentative. For example, the learners made many errors with the base form of verbs: either they omitted the to, as in “I love swim,” which mirrors the French structure “J’aime nager,” or they replaced the to with for, as infinitives in French can be preceded by the preposition pour, which in most cases accurately translates as for. The tutors did not always know how to categorize these errors: they flagged them variously as errors in prepositions, lexis, or verb forms.2 Fear of Discouraging the Learners Several tutors feared the effects of the “red pen” on their learners’ motivation; they also worried about hurting the learners’ feelings and damaging their self-esteem. As a result, they opted for selective corrections, but did not always know which errors should have been the focus of attention. A few tutors candidly admitted flagg