Teachers’ Beliefs and Practice Concerning Feedback Strategies

Abstract

This study aims at surveying what strategies teachers believe they use in giving feedback, what strategies teachers actually use in giving feedback and the relationship between their perceptions and the reality. The six subjects were teachers who taught Fundamental English II at King Mongkut’s University of Technology Thonburi (KMUTT). Each of them was observed teaching once and then asked to rank feedback strategies by perceived frequency of use. The results show that some of the perceptions about frequency of use match the actual strategies they used in class but some of them do not. Some feedback strategies, such as zero feedback and repeating student utterance, were used more frequently in actual practice than teachers believed, possibly since those feedback strategies do not require a conscious thinking process; on the other hand, the strategy summarizing strategies was used less in practice, perhaps because this strategy needs a great deal of conscious effort.