THE PEDAGOGICAL ROLE OF FEEDBACK

According to Hattie & Timperley (2007) feedback is the information that is provided by the teacher or a parent or a more capable other, regarding performance. This means that praising the learner, is not the duty of the teacher only, but it also done by the parent at home since literacy is a social practice. It could be given in oral form or it could be written. Written feedback,

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according to Skeans (2000), plays an important role in scaffolding reading and writing. In that way, it serves as a pedagogical strategy that develops literacy learning. In other words, learners do not only produce written pieces of work, but through reading the teacher’s feedback, they could be able to exhibit to the teacher how they managed to comprehend the text by making personal connections to it.

Additionally, Bansilal, James & Naidoo (2010) state the manner in which learners could use feedback in improving their school performance. They comment on the results presented by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) of 1995, 1999 and 2003 for the Grade eight learners which confirmed the poor performance of learners in mathematics. They mention that learners should be equipped to use the feedback to share their experiences about their learning.

According to Bansilal, James & Naidoo (2010) older learners are able to use the feedback effectively when they are able to reflect on their view of learning as they construct knowledge, but with younger learners it enables the teacher to identify strategies he/she could use to provide individual attention to struggling learners. In this way, feedback serves as an intervention strategy. Written feedback provides learners with the skill to monitor their writing and it enhances comprehension skills. For the teachers, it provides diagnostic clues in assessing whether learners comprehend the text by making personal connections (Skeans 2000).

Hyland & Hayland (2001) support Skeans (2000) on the value of written feedback and mentions that it provides the learner with individualized attention that is somehow impossible in normal classroom situation. Feedback serves to generally motivate learning (Shute 2008). In the FP, feedback could create a supportive learning environment as learners are still emergent readers and writers. So, the teachers’ interpersonal skills help to ease the tension that learners tend to feel, especially less able writers (Hyland & Hayland 2001). Feedback, therefore, serves not only to reinforce language development, but also boosts learners’ self-esteem.

Hattie & Timperley (2007) go on to say that feedback needs to provide information that develops the learner in a specific task in order to academically support learning so that the learner is able to use that knowledge not only for literacy development, but for other subjects and in subsequent years. This suggests that feedback mediates learning. The Sociocultural Theory

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provides an insight into how learning is mediated and scaffolded in the classroom. The school is an institution of learning which serves as a social environment where learning is mediated through instructional activities. Gibbons (2002) citing Luke and Freebody, argue that for learners to be understood as successful in their learning, they need to tap into four roles that make learning explicit in a sociocultural context. In that way, they would learn to construct interpretations based on the mutual relationship these roles possess. These roles portray the learner as a code breaker, text participant, text user and text analyst. The reading roles and processes are discussed below.

When a reader is a code breaker, he/she possesses phonemic awareness (Gibbons 2002). This suggests that the reader is aware that there is a relationship between a sound or speech and a word, and how a sentence is developed (Gibbons 2002, DBE 2011). In other words, during the reading process the focus is on phonics. The knowledge gained through phonemic awareness later allows the reader to understand that words in a text begin from left to the right of the page. Luke and Freebody caution, though, that knowing how to sound the word or breaking the code is not sufficient to construct meaning and breaking the code does not lead to successful reading (Gibbons 2002).

The second reading role expects learners to have an ability to be text participants. As a text participant, the reader is able to interrogate the text. He/she is able to understand the context for which the text was written. That implies that the reader is able to understand the writer’s intentions. At this point, the reader is able to connect with the text and use his/her prior knowledge to reflect on the message that is brought forward by the text. In this process, the reader is able to read for comprehension in that he/she is able to make inferences by using his/her experiences and connect ideas across the text. When the reader makes connections with the text, he/she becomes a text participant (Gibbons 2002).

When a reader is labelled as a text user, it is assumed that he/she is able to analyse the text. In the analysis of the text, the reader is able to understand the context and the purpose of the text. In that way, the reader is able to see that texts are different and they serve different purposes. Text analysis equips the user with an understanding of the linguistic and grammar features that each text possesses. The knowledge that the reader gains from a particular text can be used in other contexts. Such knowledge includes vocabulary development and cognitive abilities.

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As a text analyst, the learner is able to use his/her appreciation skills and defend or support the ideas the author brings forward. At this stage, the reader has acquired reading comprehension skills and understands that texts are written for a particular purpose. By integrating and reflecting on the ideas within the text and his/her own experience, the text analyst is able to make a clear statement about the author’s message and it appropriateness for the audience.

As much as these roles seem to support reading for meaning making meaning, this study argues that some of the practices might not be easy to achieve in certain educational environments. Hence this study focuses on the Grade 3 teacher’s instructional literacy practices in order to understand how the roles and processes mentioned above are facilitated for meaning making in isiXhosa literacy. Through the lens of the Sociocultural Theory, this study has investigated the role played by the teacher and her learners to make meaning of what they learned in the literacy lessons. The following section discusses the Sociocultural Theory and its relevance to this study.