Page 105 - The SpeakTeach method - Esther de Vrind

that the students had learned to assess themselves better and make better plans, nor that the self-evaluation procedure actually had an impact on the improvement of their speaking skills. In order to draw such conclusions, follow-up research is required, which would include not only the students’ assessments, but also the assessment of an expert, for example the teacher. Moreover, longitudinal research would be required to establish changes in the degree of self- regulation or the improvement of speaking skills over time.
Furthermore, we did not investigate which feedback and which improvement activities the students actually received. Follow-up research in which the teachers’ choices regarding the kind of feedback and the concrete provision of learning activities based on the students’ plans, would provide more insight into how teachers tailor their feedback and activities to learners’ needs.
Another limitation of this research was that the study focused on self-regulation by a heterogeneous group of secondary school students. Further research should be carried out in order to identify any differences in terms of year and language. It might be that lower level students differ from higher classes in meta-cognitive skills and therefore would differ in, for instance, independence and need for assistance during the self-evaluation procedure.
Implications
Despite the limitations of this study, we think it contributes to the development of knowledge about guiding students to become autonomous learners in learning to speak foreign languages. Other researchers have also argued for an iterative learning process in which learners gradually become more independent in self-regulating (e.g. Little, 2017) and some have already proposed a cycle of refection and task-repetition in order to improve speaking skills (Goh, 2017; Goh & Burns, 2012). This study adds concrete design principles to realize such an iterative learning process and proposes how students could actually go through a process of self-regulation independently by means of a self-evaluation procedure.
This self-evaluation procedure differed from the more common self-assessments in a number of respects. First of all, the evaluation addressed a specific speaking performance and not students’ speaking skills in general. Second, the speaking performance was recorded which enabled the students to listen back to their own speaking performance. Third, instead of normative use of self-evaluation, a self-evaluation instrument was used which contained
102
103
4