Teacher mini conferences in class: an alternative to provide feedback in written tasks

Abstract

Hattie and Timperley (2007) define feedback as the result where an agent, such as a teacher, provides information on the aspects of the person’ s understanding. The feedback strategy which was implemented in this study was teacher mini conferences in class. This strategy consists of pre-writing and idea generating activities where the teacher discusses with the whole class and illustrates what skill the students should use (Grabe and Kaplan, 1996). The study was carried out in a public school in the city of Cuenca, Ecuador with students learning English as a foreign language (EFL). It consisted of a target (n=36) and control group (n=31). The study was conducted during the first didactic unit (six weeks) of the scholar year 2019-2020 where the students produced a total of five paragraphs. The first paragraph served the purpose of the pre-test, while the last paragraph was the post-test. The Wilcox sign test was used for comparison between related samples (Pre - post) and the U-Mann Whitney test for independent samples. The data was processed through SPSS 25. The study concluded that teacher feedback has a larger impact considering performance in agreement with Yang, Badger, and Yu, (2006), Gielen, Peeters, Dochy, Onghena, and Struyven (2010), Zacharias (2007) y Van den Bergh, Ros, and Beijaard (2014). Further, teacher mini conferences in class revealed a positive impact on the development of supporting details, organization and transitions, mechanics, and the development of style.