'Very good' as a teacher response

Abstract

Much scholarly and pedagogical attention has been devoted to corrective feedback. In this paper, we turn to positive feedback, and in particular, call for a reconsideration of teachers’ use of explicit positive assessments such as ‘very good’. Based on examples from an ESL classroom, we show that utterances such as ‘very good’ may have the potential of inhibiting learning opportunities within particular pedagogical contexts. We then broaden our discussion by offering a range of suggestions for managing the complexities of positive feedback in the language classroom.