Abstract:

Due to the situation in the world involving the COVID-19 pandemic and an exclusively e-learning way as a consequence on the one hand and the high requirements imposed on graduates' foreign languages skills on the other, teachers face the challenging task of ensuring efficiency of the online learning process. During the pandemic, the fact that an effective traditional classroom teacher can turn out to be a rather poor online teacher was shocking. Teachers spent hours writing detailed feedback and motivating emails, but scores of many students went down, their motivation becoming rather poor. The need to develop a method to reach and encourage the students more efficiently was obvious.

The objective of the present work is to consider the main problems that arise in the foreign language class in connection with the COVID-19 pandemic; to analyze the practical experience of giving written feedback using Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) to students learning German as a second foreign language, and to offer effective models of providing feedback to students depending on the type as well as to describe the results.

This article describes the employment of Myers–Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) in giving effective written feedback to every student with the view to motivating them to study efficiently online. There are 16 personality types in total, but they can be classified into four groups depending on how they prefer to receive feedback: ST, SF, NT and NF, as sensing (S) and intuition (N) are the information-gathering functions, and thinking (T) and feeling (F) are rival instrument of decision.

A quasi-experimental design was adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of the written feedback using MBTI in the online learning context. First, the characteristics of every type were analyzed and closed questions to determine the type of students were chosen, these were used in the German classes. After defining the key characteristics, the feedback models (positive and negative) for every type were prepared, which were given to the teachers. Using a table with possible answers on the closed questions they were then able to determine the personality type of every student and choose one out of four models for feedback. This three-stage procedure (1. Giving the tasks to students; 2. Understanding personality type; 3. Choosing and sending a feedback according to the type) was implemented in the online learning environment.

Based on the experiment results, the paper draws the conclusion that a feedback chosen according to a personality type of student leads to a high level of reading and acceptance of the feedback as well as a more active and efficient work of students as a result.

The feedback models are tested and utilized now at different study levels. They can be adopted for any module taught in higher education and prove to provide more effective feedback to students while reducing the workload of teachers.

Keywords:

Feedback, MBTI, Personality Type, online learning.