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Chapter 3. Perspective of the teachers - practicality
reported that they had a tendency to check all the self-evaluations and recordings. It was striking that, in contrast with regular teaching, practical problems such as class size, type of organisation and clashes with the aims of maintaining order and keeping everyone actively occupied were not mentioned.
3.6 Conclusions and discussion
Tailoring teaching to students’ learning needs is highly desirable but seems to be very difficult for teachers to do in their regular classes (Hoffman & Duffy, 2016). This is also true for teaching speaking skills in modern foreign languages. The aim of our research was to develop and test a practical adaptive approach to teaching speaking skills. We developed the SpeakTeach approach using the Bridging Model, a theory-driven methodology designed to make education reforms practical.
The results allow us to cautiously conclude that the approach proved useful. First, because in line with its aims, an important finding of our study was that the essence of the adaptive teaching method was retained during implementation in almost all cases (28 out of 29 SpeakTeach lesson series) and that adaptive considerations played a role in this. Second, teachers found the method to be practical. The statistical analysis show that the teachers found SpeakTeach significantly more desirable than their regular teaching practice. Moreover, the adaptive approach is not considered more difficult to implement than regular teaching practice.
These findings are unusual because teachers generally find it difficult to tailor lessons to their students’ learning needs in speaking skills (Corda et al., 2012) and, because of perceived practical obstacles, often fail to adopt reforms or alter them so much that their essence is lost (Janssen et al., 2013). The teachers in this study indicated that in their regular teaching practice they found it difficult to gain insight into the students’ learning processes and to tailor teaching to suit individual students. They mentioned class size, type of organisation, keeping order and keeping students actively engaged as practical disadvantages. These disadvantages were not mentioned for the SpeakTeach method and insight into the learning process and tailoring were actually mentioned as advantages.
By getting the students to do the speaking task and the self-evaluation before existing input and exercises, space was created for coordination with learning needs. In addition, we think that we managed to develop an adaptive approach that teachers found useful in
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