Page 103 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

negative about the grammar in their speaking performances in the later cycle and there was a decline in focus on grammar in the plans for improvement from the first to the fourth cycle. Research has shown that learners find it difficult to assess themselves (Blanche, 1988; Poehner, 2012; Ross, 1998), especially on grammar and pronunciation, which might be due to their lack of the metacognitive and linguistic knowledge needed to determine the appropriateness of their utterances (e.g. Blanche, 1988; Lappin-Fortin & Rye, 2014; Dlaska & Krekeler, 2013). A tentative explanation may be that in the first cycle students did indeed have difficulties assessing their grammar and pronunciation, but as they went on, they improved and gained more insight into their grammatical competence stimulated by the self-evaluation procedure.
Besides an increase in satisfaction about grammar in the diagnoses, increasing satisfaction about fluency was also found. While there was least focus on fluency in the plans for improvement in the first cycle, in later rounds, an increase in plans for fluency was found. It seems that students expanded the focus of their plans. The shifts in focus (decline for grammar and for getting the message across, increase for fluency and pronunciation) might indicate that the students had broadened their awareness of different aspects of their speaking performance during the cycles of the self-evaluation procedure.
Research question B To what extent did students experience feedback and activities for improvement as adaptive?
Adaptivity of feedback and improvement activities were investigated in two ways: in pre- and post-measurements among an experimental and a control group and in intermediate questionnaires each time directly after the accomplishment of a specific cycle of the self- evaluation procedure carried out by the experimental group.
The results of the pre- and post-measurements showed that, in the period in which the self-evaluation procedure was used, the students found the activities to improve speaking skills equally adaptive and the feedback less adaptive than in regular teaching practice. However, the findings from the intermediate questionnaires indicated that students mainly considered that both improvement activities and feedback were tailored to their needs in the specific self-evaluation procedure cycles.
One way to interpret these data is that the questionnaire in the pre- and post- measurement addressed a whole period of time, whereas the interim questionnaire focused
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