A teacher's role in feedback and instructional conversations in a kindergarten ELA classroom

Abstract

This teacher action research examines the role of the teacher and the use of feedback to support kindergarten students' language development. This study provides three emergent categories: A) Corrective feedback provided by the teacher with and without the option of the correct form of students' utterance. B) Student provided feedback: self-correction (no teacher influence) or correcting a classmate. C) Extending the conversation through teacher prompting and students collaborating in the meaning-making process. The findings showed providing feedback was beneficial to students' language development. The findings in this research study can be used to inform educators interested in the role feedback plays in language development as well as how they can most effectively provide feedback to student errors. Although educators' contexts may be different, the findings in this study may assist and guide them in discovering what methods and ways of providing feedback work best for them and their students.