Feedback Strategies from a Student's Perspective
This classroom research project examines the effectiveness of formative feedback strategies in discussion classes. Formative feedback is a form of feedback where students identify their language problem and are given a chance to practice their weakness (Tuttle and Tuttle, 2012). In other words, formative feedback quickly “fixes” behaviors. The aim of this project was to understand student’s perceptions after receiving formative feedback. Students responded to a questionnaire that asked them to evaluate the feedback they had received and whether they could use the feedback in future activities. While over 90% of the students stated that formative feedback was helpful, less than 60% of the students reported that it was the most helpful activity
Time Pressure and Within-task Variation in EFL Oral Performance
This article reports a study of variability in the oral performance of 17 English as a foreign language (EFL) students in a Tunisian university. Time pressure, long ignored by research community as a key element in the process of language learning, was operationalized as the prime factor in order to give evidence of variable output during task engagement. Analysis of the subsequent performances on the same task showed that time pressure pushed learners towards varied results, that is, higher rates of complexity, decrements in accuracy and mixed patterns in fluency. The results were found to be verifiable in light of the established task-based literature and the processing-based theory whose main tenet is attention as a limited resource.
The Effectiveness of Two Approaches to the Teaching of High School American History
The purpose of this study was to test the effectiveness of studies in depth utilizing selected materials which had been developed for teaching high school American history.