What are the benefits of using peer-feedback in a multilingual English language teaching classroom?

This paper explores the advantages and disadvantages of using peer-feedback in a multilingual English teaching classroom. The use of peer-feedback gives students a chance to think more thoroughly about their answer before presenting it in whole group-feedback. Within the classroom many factors can influence the language that is produced, for example; anxiety, confidence and even ethnic stereo-types. Examples of the use of peer feedback have been extracted from a collection of half an hour lessons taught by various CELTA qualified teachers to a class of students from a variety of different countries including Thailand, Bulgaria and Italy. The challenges associated with the term “benefit” are examined, specifically how it can have many different meanings depending on various people. In some instances beneficial can refer to the amount a student can contribute within a lesson, however to others it may refer to the amount of understanding they have of the subject cognitively. This paper considers existing views on language teaching and peer-feedback (Hall, Smith, & Wicaksono:2011; Zheng:2012; Yu & Lee: 2014) and compares them to the data that has been collected for this particular study. Using an applied linguistics approach, real data provides some understanding of what effect feedback can have on the students in a learning environment and when it can be beneficial to use.