Recording oral feeedback for written assignments

In recent weeks, I have been reading a bit about how best to give learners feedback.

John Hattie  says the following:

"Effective feedback must answer three major questions asked by a teacher and/or by a student: Where am I going? (What are the goals?), How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?), and Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) These questions correspond to notions of feed up, feed back, and feed forward. How effectively answers to these questions serve to reduce the gap is partly dependent on the level at which the feedback operates."

So far, so good, but what can the problems be with giving feedback to learners? You might do all the right things: use a correction code to encourage the learners to monitor their own work and notice the gap befween their own performance and the correct form only to find that the learners continue to make the same mistakes. Additionally, if you have 25 students in a class, it can be difficult to consistently provide detailed feedback to every learner in the class. However, we still need to make sure that the learners know where they are going, how they are going and what they need to do in order to ensure that they are making strides in the right direction.

Currently, and unfortunately, I am not in a position to teach ESOL learners on a regular basis. For this research project, I decided to try out recording spoken feedback for a group of trainees on one of their written assignments. I was inspired to do this after reading Nathan Hall's inspiring and detailed post on the subject and after purchasing Graham Stanley's excellent book in which he also advocates this practice.

I wanted to see if trainees found the practice useful and whether it could be used to feedback on ESOL or literacy learners' work. In order to carry out the micro mini research project, I downloaded a free software tool; I used 'Jing' but any other kind of screencasting (recording the screen as a video along with the audio) tool would be fine. I had recently bought a microphone to help me with recording podcasts and had already marked the trainees' assignments: a reflective piece on their teaching.

With Jing, you are limited to 5 minutes of feedback so you have to be concise in what you say. I found this quite difficult and was dismayed at how often I said 'important' but I'm sure with a bit more practice, I'd get used to it. You can see and hear one example here. Once I had recorded my feedback, I saved the link and posted it to the participants. Quick and easy!

Feedback and implications

What I liked about the process was being able to elaborate on what I had written. For example, if I had commented, 'Watch your use of sentence structure here', I was able to explain exactly what I meant and the individual was able to see it on screen whilst listening to me provide examples to support my points. Unfortunately, I was not able to annotate as I was speaking, but I tried to indicate to what I was referring by moving the mouse to the relevant point. The trainees commented that they had found the feedback useful because it was more personal. Nathan Hall mentions that the approach is 'softer' than having written feedback only.

One of the limitations here was that perhaps the trainees didn't really need such detailed feedback. They had all produced good pieces of work and it could be argued that the feedback did not really add anything: it did not move learning forward. However, I would definitely like to use it again. In my line of work, it would probably be most useful when trainees submit drafts. It can be time-consuming ploughing and correcting errors; with oral feedback, you could provide an overview of the assignment along with a few comments to consider. There is an argument that feedback should not be too detailed: learners need to be able to work out the mistakes for themselves but spoken feedback can point them in the right direction.

What do you think? Do you think you could use this practice with your ESOL and/or literacy learners? If so,  how might you use it? What problems might there be?

Any constructive comments welcome!