17 students hear the feedback directly from their lecturer. The impact is good when it
gives good impression to the students, but if it does not, then the impact will still be great in size but negative.
Teachers find oral feedback as an important tool to help students achieve a higher proficiency in a second and foreign language Rydahl, 2005, p. 2.
Giving ineffective oral feedback may hinder the progression of the students, but giving effective oral feedback will be helpful for the students in improving their
proficiency. Language learning will involve a lot of speaking and listening. In speaking and listening activity, this form of feedback is the most common. For
language lecturers, mastering giving effective oral feedback will help them make the language learning more effective.
5. Directness in Negative Feedback
During a conversation, often a speaker tries to convey not only information but also their feeling through the words heshe uses. Smith 1991 describes
“An indirect speech act is an utterance that contains the illocutionary force indicators for
one kind of illocutionary act but which is uttered to perform another type of illocutionary act.” p. 19. Smith explains that a speaker may say something that
causes the listener to feel something more than the literal meaning of the sentence. The sentence uttered by a speaker may have a hidden meaning behind the literal
meaning. A person may say “The room is cold” to ask someone to close the door. Saying “the room is cold” gives the signal to the listener that something is wrong
with the room that makes the room cold, thus, the listener should do something with it that is to close the door to prevent cold air coming in.
18 Moreover,
“Speech acts must be planned by taking into account the relation between the speaker and the hearer” Ardissono, Boella, Lesmo, 1995. When
we are talking to someone we respect or with higher status or someone we are not really close to, we would use a polite form of a language. A speaker uses more
complex sentences to prevent from offending the listener. The following statement is often used in ending a conversation: “It was nice to chat with you, but someone
is waiting for me now.” It means that heshe has to end the chat because heshe has to go to meet someone inste
ad of saying “I’m going. Bye” that may be not polite in some occasions.
Indirect approach is used to prevent the interlocutor from being offended Brown Levinson, 1987; Kasper, 1990; Leech, 1983, as cited by Ardissono,
Boella, and Lesmo, p. 2. He uses some sentences for informing the interlocutor that he has to go. Instead of directly saying what the speaker wants to convey, he
uses some sentences to prevent the interlocutor from being offended. Imagine you are having a chat with someone and suddenly he says “I’m busy. Bye” you will
feel that this person wants to avoid you or he hates you and wants to leave you as soon as possible. That is why in saying goodbye people use a set of sentences to
make the goodbye more polite and less rude. Giving negative feedback is also a speech act. There are two types of feedback
based on its directness. Feedback can be direct or indirect. It depends on how the information on the feedback is presented. Direct feedback means that the meaning
is directly implied to the sentence. The feedback is given directly to the student as it is. The sentence literally shows the meaning. For example, a lecturer wants to
19 correct the students on the pronunciation and
he says “You pronounce the ‘th’ in ‘three’ incorrectly. It should be ‘th’ instead of ‘t’”. The lecturer directly mentions
the mistake of the student. The student does not need to process the sentence complexly, heshe just needs to listen and to take the sentence as it is.
In indirect feedback, the student needs to analyse the sentence in order to get what the
lecturer is trying to say. For example, “We do not pronounce the ‘th’ in ‘three’ like ‘t’ but we pronounce it as ‘th’” if this sentence is taken literally by the
student, then heshe will think that the lecturer only tells him facts, but actually the lect
urer is telling the students that he had made a mistake on pronouncing the ‘th’ in ‘three’ and the student must correct his pronunciation. The student needs to
process the sentence in order to know what the lecturer is trying to say. In short, indirect negative feedback will be more polite and less rude
compared to direct negative feedback. The students hearing an indirect feedback will receive less negative feeling compared to direct feedback. However, there is a
possibility that indirect negative feedback may not be as effective as direct negative feedback. The student who receives indirect negative feedback may not be able to
find out what the actual meaning of the feedback is.
6. The Use of Hedging Devices in Negative Feedback
