Meet The Speakers: Ernesto Vargas Gil

05/03/2018 - 21:44

UNFORTUNATELY, THIS SESSION HAS BEEN CANCELLED DUE TO A FAMILY HEALTH CRISIS.

Room 317
11:00-11:40
40-minute talk

Feed-forward feedback: an approach to feedback for learner autonomy

Ernesto Vargas Gil

Feedback is considered to be an essential component of classroom assessment. However, its effect on the students and their learning is not necessarily always positive. What makes it so? In this talk I will present a case for a collaborative, formative, non-evaluative, feedforward-looking approach to feedback, not only effective but fundamental for the challenges of learning/teaching English in today´s world.

Ernesto Vargas Gil’s Bio

PhD researcher
Centre for Applied Linguistics - University of Warwick
England

Ernesto Vargas Gil is a PhD researcher in the Centre for Applied Linguistics at the University of Warwick, UK. His research areas of interests are Teacher Autonomy, Language Teacher Education, and Contemporary Educational Reform. He has taught at various universities in the United Kingdom and presented at conferences in Mexico, United States, Colombia, Germany, France and across the UK.

Why have you chosen this topic for your presentation?

Despite its importance, feedback is often taken as a ´given´. If feedback is ever taught or discussed, it is frequently about face-saving issues. However, if done appropriately, feedback has an enormous potential, particularly for learner autonomy.

What do you want participants to take away from your presentation?

The awareness of the enormous potential of feedback for helping learners own their learning process, and also for the teacher to rethink the nature of teaching and their own overall role in this process.

Summary of presentation

Feedback is commonly considered to be an essential component of classroom assessment (Hattie, 2009 & 2012). However, it has also been argued that feedback does not necessarily always have a positive effect on students and that sometimes it may even represent a hindrance in their learning process (Earl, 2013). Even though different factors are thought to contribute to make feedback effective, one of the major elements is likely to be the general approach to it adopted by the teacher. In this talk, I will present an alternative approach to feedback, used in an action research project aimed at enhancing learning, in the form of a collaborative, formative, non-evaluative feedforward-looking feedback (as opposed to a more traditional one-way, summative, retrospective-looking version of it). I will discuss the results of such project, and some key principles and strategies drawn from it. Finally, I will argue the case that this form of feedback is not just more effective but that it is fundamental in the development of a more autonomous second language learner, better equipped to face the increasing complexity and challenges of the dynamicity of linguistic variations of the English language in today´s world.