The Importance of Praise as a Positive Feedback

Abstract

The enhancement of students’ learning outcomes, maintaining students’ motivation and having a suitable learning environment are the major concerns of the majority of teachers. One of the recommended pedagogical methods that is beneficial for teachers’ teaching practices is praise. In order to increase motivation and enhance students learning outcomes in EFL classrooms, providing praise is considered as an efficient strategy. Our main objective is to investigate the role of implementing praise as a positive feedback in EFL classrooms and checking whether it fosters students’ motivation and promotes the appropriate behaviours. The qualitative approach has been chosen to collect data from the selected sample to prove or disprove the suggested hypotheses. Among the selected tools that have been chosen are a classroom observation and an interview.The results of the study show that to some extent teachers do consider using praise in EFL classrooms, yet the use of praise was limited to using only the general type. In addition, the results demonstrate that praise leads to a considerable increase of motivation in learning English.