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On Feedback and Correction
When learning languages students make lots of mistakes. There are different schools of thought on correcting these mistakes. After my first Spanish class I was disappointed to discover that my teacher did not correct my mistakes and allowed me to say the wrong thing over and over again. How was I to improve if I did not know what I was doing wrong? The argument against correction is that if done excessively it destroys confidence and can stop students from practicing.
Computer games give you feedback constantly. If you do things correctly you progress to the next stage if you don’t you remain where you are. This is done without destroying confidence or discouraging practice. Why can’t the same be done in the class room?
There are a lot of factors to consider here. How well you do in a computer game is usually trivial, there is no real consequence to doing badly. This is not usually the case for language classes.
The key factor in computer games is that the feedback doesn’t discourage the payer form continuing. This is partly because of the low cost of failure, negative feedback doesn’t mean much because you can try the same task again immediately and get better feedback. Repeating the task and doing better brings instant reward. Whenever you receive ‘negative’ feedback you get also chance to perform the task and immediately and get rewarded.
In a game you must improve to get to the next phase. You can’t get there without performing the task you just failed at again and accomplishing it. When learning a language, you can get to the next part of the lesson or course regardless of how you perform in the current part. So there is immediate downside to getting things wrong but no immediate benifit to getting them right. In short: making mistakes have an immediate downside, the upside of getting them right is not of such great value because you will progress to the next stage anyway.
Classes need to be an environment where feedback encourages not discourages students. If this is achieved feedback can only be a positive.
