The Hand Signal System

The question of how classroom teachers can best provide negative feedback (corrections) to their students when they produce oral grammatical errors needs more attention than it has received, since in the typical classroom a considerable amount of time is devoted to such feedback. When a student produces an error the teacher needs to make an instantaneous decision, not only on whether to correct the error but also on how to correct it. This article addresses the second of these issues. What follows is a presentation and critique of three commonly used verbal feedback techniques and a proposal for a nonverbal feedback technique comprising a set of hand signals, each of which is used to indicate a certain error type. The article concludes with a discussion of the value of the use of negative feedback in the classroom.