Corectarea greșelilor și oferirea de feedback în predarea online a limbii române ca limbă străină

Abstract

This paper analyses how written corrective feedback was provided during the online teaching of Romanian as a foreign language at an Italian university in the context of the coronavirus pandemic. The retrospective analysis focuses on the most common types of mistakes identified in the students’ homework and on the strategies applied by the author as the lecturer for Romanian language in the revision of the homework. The first part of the research aimed to identify and classify the errors appearing in the students’ texts, investigating the possible causes of the errors. The findings revealed that grammar errors were made more frequently by the students at beginner level, while lexical errors were made by students at an intermediate or advanced level of knowledge. Results also show that the teacher tended to use various types of corrective feedback, depending on the error type that was identified. The teacher’s feedback took different forms, ranging from simple error correction to extended comments and the proposal of alternative solutions. Moreover, the corrective feedback was offered directly for beginner students, while the corrections tended to be hedged when addressing advanced students, in order to avoid their discouragement. The students found the teacher’s feedback useful and even used the homework as a means to signal their difficulties with learning and ask for help. These results contradict previous research claiming that effective feedback involved direct indications using the imperative.