Page 27 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

about getting students to analyse their mistakes and put them in the right categories. The aim was to get the students to reflect on various aspects of language and activities that improve their speaking skills. The self-evaluation form asked about both areas for improvement and positive points, as research in positive psychology has shown that reflecting on positive points activates positive emotions that in turn are beneficial to learning (Voerman, Meijer, Korthagen & Simons, 2012). The self-evaluation can reveal whether students themselves know what they are doing well. Imbalance in the self-evaluation, for example a narrow focus on only negative points, could be a reason for a conversation between teacher and student about the student’s beliefs, attribution and negative feelings in the lessons. Then the teacher would focus his/her feedback on affective factors (see Figure 1).
Many existing approaches also focus in a one-sided way on analysis of performance, whereas in this procedure students also produce a plan for improvement and state what help they need. This means that the self-evaluation is to some extent self-managing, as it contains scaffolds, intermediate steps and support (Beeker, Canton & Trimbos, 2008), such as suggestions for their plans on how to tackle problems.
Finally, what is unique about this self-evaluation procedure is that it enables teachers to give adaptive feedback in classes of 25-30 students, while many other adaptive approaches often take place outside the classroom in one-to-one situations (e.g. Poehner, 2012). The approach is intended to be practical in the sense that it can be used during normal classroom teaching. It works in such a way that all of the students are actively engaged. Within 30 minutes during class, the students have done their speaking task and analysed their recording. Then the teacher quickly scans the self-evaluation forms for discrepancies and tailors his/her feedback and activities for the next lesson to the students.
2.4 Investigation of the self-evaluation procedure: shifting feedback
To investigate whether the self-evaluation procedure really helped teachers to adapt their proposed feedback to meet individual students’ needs regarding speaking skills and to evaluate whether the approach is practical in everyday teaching, the procedure was tested on a small scale by three French teachers who taught the final 3 years at three different secondary schools in two year 5 pre-university classes and one year 4 pre-university class. In each class 5 or 6 students were chosen at random (n=17). For the purposes of this study, it was not necessary to select students with exactly the same level of language skills, background,
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