The progression of pupils in their reading development and the creation of their reading self-concept depends to a large extent on the feedback of teachers to pupils about their reading and performance. On the other hand incentives, praise and other content feedback provide students with an explanation of their own mistakes and the creation of reading self-concept. On the other hand, students who have negative responses from the social environment can have many problems. When they have poor reading literacy skills and lack of reading experience, begin to avoid reading or feel incompetent in reading. In addition to giving feedback, teachers must monitor their pupils’ progress, since this is the only way to ensure students’ optimal reading and self-concept development.
In the empirical study, we investigated how the students of the sixth grade of elementary school assess their reading self-concept in English language as a foreign language, and how foreign language teachers define the effectiveness of feedback and their role in influencing the assessment of the readers' self-concept. 110 pupils of the 6th grade from the six elementary schools of the Osrednjeslovenska region and six teachers of English from these six elementary schools we included in the sample. From each school, one 6th grade class and their teacher of English participated in the study. To investigate the students’ reading self-concept in English as a foreign language and the impact of the teacher's feedback on the pupils’ reading self-concept, two research instruments were created in the empirical part: a reading self-concept scale for English as a foreign language and an observation sheet. The results show that the reading self-concept of the 6th grade students is average, since the majority of pupils (46.1 %) consider reading self-concept in foreign language average, more than a third of pupils (37.1 %) consider their reading self-concept in a foreign language to be low, while reading self-concept in a foreign language is highly evaluated by only 16.8 % of all surveyed pupils. The results also show that teachers use different types of feedback during the lesson, however the implementation of individual strategies is not equally frequent. The teachers used a positive strategy in 56.7%, while the remaining four strategies of positive feedback were used in 10 to 20 %. Among corrective feedback strategies, the teachers used the most commonly used strategy for the recast (45.8 %) and the explicit correction strategy (43.4 %). The results of the interviews showed that teachers are aware of their own role in providing feedback to pupils, and that they are aware of strategies and contents of the given feedback. It has been confirmed that the teacher's feedback influences the readability of pupils in a foreign language, so these instruments enable teachers to monitor the evaluation of the reading self-concept of their pupils in a foreign language and to monitor different types and feedback strategies that can help teachers in planning further lessons and also create additional feedback in reading in a foreign language.
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