Audio feedback in higher education: The case of an online English-medium instruction course

Abstract

Previous studies have showed that effective assessment feedback has to be clear, specific, and individualised. However, difficulty appears to provide large groups with effective feedback. Audio feedback seems to be a reasonable al-ternative to this situation. In the last decade, this type of feedback has received the scholars’ attention; yet, the bulk of this research has been the study of teachers’ and learners’ perceptions of audio feedback in comparison with writ-ten feedback. In this chapter, a different perspective has been adopted. The study explores what makes effective the audio feedback used in an online uni-versity course in a non-English speaking country where English is used as a lingua franca. The research has focused on the performance of a teacher. First, the learners’ perception of the effectiveness of this type of feedback has been measured; then, the discourse structure and the metadiscourse used by the teacher have been analysed. Results have shown that in general audio feedback was preferred, being perceived as outstanding the clarity of the explanations, and as particularly relevant some features of teaching with emotional intelli-gence such as teacher emotional support and social presence. The analysis of 360 recordings of audio feedback has revealed the recurrent use of some struc-tural and metalinguistic patterns showing characteristics of affective speech. The results of the discourse analysis would be interesting for online EMI lectur-ers, who are novice in the use of audio feedback or that want to improve its effectiveness.