How to Give Feedback That Actually Improves Student Speaking

By Dr Ayobami Gideon Babalola • ESL & Teaching

Feedback is the most powerful tool in a language teacher’s kit — and the most frequently misused.

When feedback is given well, it accelerates acquisition, builds confidence, and helps learners develop a self-correcting internal monitor that serves them outside the classroom. When it is given badly, it silences learners, creates anxiety, and produces the most common complaint I hear from adult ESL students about their previous teachers: ‘I was always afraid to speak in case I said something wrong.’

Over fifteen years, I have made most of the feedback mistakes that can be made. Here are the five principles I eventually arrived at — each one drawn from direct classroom experience with adult learners.

Principle 1: Timing Is Everything

There are two types of speaking activity, and each requires a different feedback approach.

In accuracy-focused activities — drills, controlled practice, pronunciation exercises — immediate feedback is appropriate and expected. Learners know they are practising for correctness, and gentle, immediate correction is part of the contract.

In fluency-focused activities — discussions, role plays, information gap tasks — immediate interruption is almost always counterproductive. The learner is attempting to communicate; breaking their flow to correct grammar signals that the grammar matters more than the message. They will communicate less freely as a result.

For fluency activities, use delayed feedback: note errors discreetly during the activity, then address them at the end with the whole class — without identifying who made each error. This preserves both the communicative momentum and the learner’s dignity.

Principle 2: Be Selective — Not Everything Needs Correcting

The teacher who corrects every error produces learners who speak less and less. The teacher who never corrects anything produces learners who fossilise their errors.

The principle I follow is this: correct errors that impede communication or that relate to the lesson’s target language. Leave other errors for later or for written feedback.

Prioritise correction for:

• Errors that make the meaning unclear or ambiguous

• Errors in the target structure of the current lesson

• Errors the learner has made repeatedly across multiple lessons

Leave for later:

• Minor pronunciation variations that do not affect comprehension

• Grammatical slips in structures not yet taught

• Vocabulary choices that are unconventional but understandable

Principle 3: Recast Rather Than Correct

Recasting is the most elegant feedback technique available to a speaking teacher. Instead of saying ‘That’s wrong — the correct form is…’ you simply repeat what the learner said with the error corrected, naturally and without drama, as part of your response.

Learner: “Yesterday I go to the market.”

Teacher (recasting): “Oh, you went to the market! What did you buy?”

The error is corrected. The conversation continues. No anxiety is created. The learner may or may not consciously notice the correction — but over time, the correct form becomes increasingly familiar.

Recasting works because it models correct usage in the most natural possible context — a real communicative exchange — without making the error the focus of the interaction.

Principle 4: Involve Learners in Their Own Feedback

One of the most powerful — and most underused — feedback techniques is self-correction. Before you correct a learner, give them the opportunity to hear and correct themselves.

A simple pause and a questioning expression is often enough. Or a prompt: ‘Almost — can you try that sentence again?’ Many learners, given a moment’s reflection, will catch their own error. The self-corrected error produces far stronger memory trace than a teacher-corrected one.

For more advanced adult learners, peer correction — where learners evaluate each other’s speaking using a simple checklist — develops the meta-linguistic awareness that is essential for independent language development.

Principle 5: Separate Feedback From Evaluation

Feedback tells a learner what happened and how to improve. Evaluation tells a learner how they performed against a standard. Both have their place — but they should never be confused.

When every piece of feedback feels like a test result — when every correction feels like a mark being deducted — learners begin to approach speaking activities as performances to be judged rather than communication to be attempted. This is the environment that produces silence.

Make a deliberate habit of separating the two. After a speaking task, feedback on language comes before any comment on overall performance. And in most lessons, feedback on language is all that is needed.

The goal of feedback in a speaking classroom is not to evaluate the learner. It is to give them the information they need to speak better next time. Keep that goal central, and every feedback decision becomes easier.

What feedback technique have you found most effective with your adult learners? Share in the comments — I genuinely want to hear what works in your classroom.

FREE RESOURCE

Download the 5-Day English Speaking Challenge Pack — speaking activities designed with feedback principles built in. Free at drgspeaks.jrzp.org/esl-teaching