Page 21 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind
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how this is to be achieved. Teachers may set up their lessons as they see fit. This means that the way speaking skills are embedded in the school curriculum can vary from school to school. Nevertheless, all students have to achieve the same final attainment levels at the same standard in free communication situations. This means that students need to have practised free production, the last phase in the exercise typology of Neuner, Krüger & Grewer (1981) and that teachers must bring the individual students in a class of 30 up to the same final attainment levels, regardless of their diverse prior knowledge and language skills. Feedback can be a very effective tool in this regard (Hattie & Timperley, 2007), significantly improving speaking skills (Lyster & Saito, 2010). However, experience in continuing education and in classroom teaching shows that giving feedback on students’ spontaneous dialogue is precisely the aspect of teaching that modern foreign language teachers find most difficult (Corda et al., 2012). This chapter explores how adaptive feedback on speaking skills can be provided in regular teaching.
2.2 Regular and desirable approach to giving feedback on speaking skills
A very common approach to giving feedback in secondary schools is for the teacher to walk around the classroom while students are talking to each other in pairs in the foreign language in order to spot problems that the teacher may then decide to correct. This regular method of giving feedback and a desirable approach can be characterised using the following questions: When is feedback given, on what, how and at what level? (see Figure 1).
When?
First and foremost descriptive studies have shown that teachers do not usually give much feedback and that their feedback is not divided equally among the students (Gass & Mackey, 2012). Because of their belief that feedback disrupts communication and can make students anxious about speaking (Lyster, Saito & Sato, 2013), teachers often give less feedback than the students want (Yoshida, 2008).
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